Category: Magazines

The Price of High-Quality Information

by James Wallace Harris, 6/30/25

We all know the internet is full of crappy information. The creators of the Internet intended it to be an information utopia. They wanted information to be free and instantly available. It turns out free information is only worth what you paid for it.

The Internet destroyed the local paper and investigative journalism. Quality magazine journalism is circling the drain. Television news is more abundant than ever, but it’s so predigested and targeted to specific audiences that it’s worthless.

Most of the high-quality sources of information are behind paywalls. Every morning, I get up and listen to Apple News+ narrators reading articles from quality magazines as I do my physical therapy exercises. Usually, that’s one thirty-minute article. Unlike podcasts, magazine journalism features a greater percentage of useful information per minute. I truly despise the kind of podcasts that spend more time on the host’s personality than the topic promised in the thumbnail.

Apple News+ gives me access to over 400 magazines and newspapers. This is the bargain of the century for $12.99 a month. However, it’s doubtful these magazines earn enough money from this service to keep them going. The real way to support them is to subscribe to each periodical. Apple News+ is like Spotify, good for the consumer, bad for the creator. The ethical way to use Spotify is to locate albums you want to buy. And the ethical way to use Apple News+ is to find the journals you should subscribe to.

I know these periodicals have become expensive. The Atlantic is $79.99 for a digital subscription. The New Yorker is $130 for a digital subscription. Why pay those prices when I already get the content in Apple News+? Especially when I will consume the content via Apple News+.

The answer is support. Think of quality journalism as an important charity. However, there is another reason. When I read a great article, I want to share it with my friends. Apple News+ is so locked down that it’s not possible. You can only share with other Apple News+ subscribers. You can’t even cut and paste from the screen.

Many periodicals that publish on the web can be copied to an email or printed as a PDF and shared. However, even those methods of getting around the paywall might disappear.

I often read articles that I know friends would also want to read. Some paywalled publications do allow for limited sharing. It should be a standard feature.

We need to move away from the shitty free content. Sharing is prevalent on the Internet, but consider the type of content people share. It’s mostly mindless entertainment or opinions. We need to learn to distinguish between well-researched articles and endless unfounded opinions.

The easiest way for me to share content is if my friends subscribe to Apple News+. And if more people subscribed, the publications would get more money.

We live in an age where authority is suspect. Everyone wants their views to dominate, and will rationalize their beliefs with any content that supports those views. We have lost the ability to evaluate what is real.

The trouble is reality can’t be understood with sound bites. Any topic worth considering requires significant study and research. TV and podcasts create content too quickly. Their information is presented too soon after events and produced too fast. Long-form journalism explores ideas in depth, and that takes time.

It also takes time to read such content. We’ve trained our minds to consume content quickly that was created quickly. Start paying attention to the information you consume and think about how it was produced. If you’re listening to a podcast that lasts an hour, note how much actual useful information you gleaned from that hour. If you get your news from television, pay attention to how long each news segment lasts. Think about how that news was gathered and why. And pay particular attention to the personalities presenting the news on TV and podcasts. Is it more about them or the content?

The highest quality content is nonfiction books written by well-educated researchers. However, it’s not possible to read enough nonfiction books to keep up with everything we need to know. I believe the best compromise for consuming high-quality information is long-form journalism.

You will be far better educated if you spend one hour a day on one subject than one hour a day on twenty different five-minute topics. This is where a service like Apple News+ succeeds. And it does have competitors, such as Zinio. My library offers a selection of free digital magazines and newspapers through Libby.

JWH

Pop Culture vs. Social Media

by James Wallace Harris, 1/1/25

I began pondering the differences between generations that grew up with pop culture versus generations that grew up with social media when playing Trivia Pursuit. I then noticed the same differences while watching Jeopardy. Pop culture is about what most people know, while social media is about knowing the details of subcultures.

I’m often surprised by how much young contestants on Jeopardy know about the 1960s and older pop culture, but old and young players are very selective in their knowledge of 21st-century trivia. For years, I thought people my age just couldn’t keep up with popular music after 1990 because of changing mental conditions. But now I wonder if it’s because popular music shattered into countless genres appealing to various subcultures. In other words, there became too many art forms to remember their trivia.

I was born in 1951 and my personality was shaped by the pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Pop culture was primarily television, AM radio, movies, books, newspapers, magazines, and comics. People watched the same three television networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC. They often saw the same hit films and listened to the same Top 40 songs. They usually read a single daily paper. Some people read books, usually, paperbacks bought off twirling racks which sold in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The most common magazines seen in people’s homes were National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Time.

The by-product of that limited array of pop culture was people within a generation shared a common awareness of what each other liked. You might not watch Leave It to Beaver or Perry Mason, but you knew what those shows were about.

People growing up since the Internet, especially since the explosion of social media, didn’t have popular culture, they had social media that focused on subcultures. Social media might be all about sharing, but people’s shared interests have broken down into thousands of special interests. People on the internet crave contact with others who share their interests, but no one group, not even Swifties, makes up a popular culture.

There are songs on Spotify with billions of plays that are completely unknown to the average American. The Academy Awards now nominate ten pictures for the Best Picture category, but most Americans have seldom seen them before they were announced. Hundreds of scripted TV shows are produced yearly yet it’s quite easy for all your friends and family to have a different favorite. My wife and I struggle to find shows we’re willing to watch together.

Mass media has broken down into specialized media devoted to subcultures.

Pop culture was a product of mass media. It inspired group identity through common knowledge. I’m not sure it exists anymore.

Social media is a byproduct of individuals trying to find others sharing similar interests. It isolates people into smaller groups. It promotes individual interests that limit people’s ability to overlap with other people’s interests. It makes people specialize. You become obsessed with one subculture.

I wonder if the MAGA movement is unconsciously countering that trend. They think they want to return to the past, but what they want is to be part of a large group. Their delusion is believing that if everyone looked alike and thought alike, it would create a happier society. I’m not sure that’s the case. The 1950s were not Happy Days, and the 1960s wasn’t The Age of Aquarius.

I’m not sure that happiness comes from the size of the group you join. Some happiness does come from interacting with others and sharing a common interest. I also think people might be happier knowing less about subcultures, and more about pop culture. But that’s just a theory.

Could people withdraw some from the internet to become more physically social? I don’t think we can give up on the internet, but do we need to use it as much as we do?

I liked it when my friends watched the same TV shows or movies. I also loved that my friends knew about the same albums, and would play them together, or go to the same concerts. Pop culture was popular culture. Will we ever see that again? And is that a delusion on my part. Am I only remembering a more social time from youth that naturally disappears after we marry?

JWH

Reading History Books About Events I Originally Watched on Television

by James Wallace Harris, 12/8/24

The 1960 U.S. presidential election is the first one I remember, but just barely. I was eight years old. My father was for Nixon and my mother for Kennedy. I decided I liked Kennedy because he was younger, more dynamic and had a good-looking wife. Even at eight, good looking women were often a deciding factor. I remember getting in a fight in the school playground because I was for Kennedy and the other kid was for Nixon. Neither of us got to decide the issue because a teacher pulled us apart.

During the Kennedy years I didn’t watch TV news. I would sometimes stay home from school to watch the Mercury space launches. Back then the TV news departments of each network would take over all broadcasting. In the first half of the 1960s, the space program was about the only real-world activity I paid any attention to.

I did pay some attention during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, mainly because I lived on Homestead Air Force Base, and everyone talked about it constantly. I remember having duck and cover drills at Homestead Air Force Base Elementary, but I was disappointed when there were no real A-bombs dropped. (I was very immature for my age.)

I didn’t become a news watcher until Kennedy’s death. I remember that weekend, my family watched the news constantly, and the following week too. That’s when I started following Walter Cronkite. I turned twelve three days after Kennedy was shot.

The news also became exciting in February of 1964 when The Beatles came to America. It was during 1965 that older boys I knew began worrying about being drafted, and I started paying attention to news about Vietnam.

The CBS Evening News was my main source of information about life beyond my own little world during the 1960s. I sometimes got to see The Today Show on NBC because my mother watched it while making breakfast. I liked that show because I found Barbara Walters hot. (Okay, I’ve already said I was a weird kid.) Sometimes I would watch news specials or documentaries. While in the ninth grade (1965-66) I had a civics course. But for the most part I just wasn’t that aware of what was going on in the world except for Top 40 AM music.

I don’t remember reading the paper, The Miami Herald, until 1968. I did start to read magazines in 1965, but that was haphazard. People would give my parents copies of Life, Time, Newsweek, Look, Saturday Evening Post, and National Geographic from time to time, and I found them fascinating. On my own, after 1965, I would buy Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and MAD Magazine. During twelfth grade (1968-69) my English teacher got me interested in literary fiction, and I subscribed to Saturday Review with money I made from working in a grocery store. I really didn’t understand it though. In late 1968 or early 1969, I got hooked on Rolling Stone magazine and sometimes bought Creem when it started publishing.

A whole lot of what I knew about the counterculture came from Life Magazine.

If you think about it one way, television and magazines offered a fairly diverse view on what was happening in the world, but squinted at it another way, it was a rather limited view.

In December 2024, I’ve been reading three books about the 1960s that explore events I encountered in two minute stories on TV, or read about in a few pages in a magazine when they first happened. Some of those short snippets of current events made huge impressions on me as a kid. They shaped who I thought I was. The history books makes me realize I was mostly uninformed.

The reality of the 1960s is I was a kid going to school every day except for long summer vacations. I started 1960 in New Jersey but moved to Mississippi then to Florida then to South Carolina back to Florida, then Mississippi again, and back to Florida. I went to thirteen different schools during the 1960s. The only newsworthy event I saw live was the launch of Apollo 8. I had a chance to see Kennedy in 1962 when he came to Homestead Air Force Base. They let us out of school to see him, but me and my friends went fishing instead. My sister was at Dinner Key Auditorium when Jim Morrison flashed the crowd. I got to meet an astronaut in 1968, but I’ve forgotten which one. And this is hardly newsworthy. I got to see Cream play during their farewell tour in 1968. Oh, and I attended one SDS rally.

In other words, I experienced the legendary Sixties mostly via AM radio, television, and magazines. I did have long hair sometimes, and I sometimes messed around with drugs, but I was hardly a hippie or a radical. I did get into the counterculture more in the 1970s, but that’s another story.

The point of this long-winded essay is I’m now reading history books about years I lived through. I can contrast my memories to behind the scenes accounts of things I got from soundbites. That’s quite enlightening.

We live with the illusion that we think we understand what is real and true. We delude ourselves that we make decisions on relevant information. But we don’t. If I could have read the history books about the sixties I’m reading in old age when I was young, I could have gotten closer to seeing reality.

Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley, two heroes of my youth, claimed that LSD opened the doors of perception, and that might be true on a nonverbal level, but a deep reading of history books is far greater at revealing reality that we can comprehend on a verbal level.

Lately, I’ve been reading that reading is going out of fashion with young people. That’s a shame. Even back when I was a teen, and only got superficial understandings about the events around me from superficial news sources, it did make me more aware.

The three books above are filling in details on things happening around me as I was growing up. I’m reminded of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of the Thin Man.”

I realize I’ve been Mr. Jones my whole life, and I’m still trying to figure out what happened.

JWH

How To Calculate the Value of Your Monthly Subscriptions

by James Wallace Harris, 7/4/23

I feel like Susan and I have too many monthly subscriptions for watching television, listening to music and books, and reading the news. Everything is going digital, and everything requires a subscription. That increasing number of monthly subscriptions is bothering me, but is it really too many, or a problem?

I decided to create a way to measure their value. I looked at the monthly cost versus the total hours Susan and I use each service and then calculated the hourly cost of using each subscription. The results were surprising.

FYI, the hours were calculated by how much each of us used the service. For example, We both watch Acorn TV together for one hour a night, so the total usage was 60 hours for the month. For YouTube TV, Hulu, Peacock, and Netflix, the hours look very large, but it’s because I add both mine and Susan’s together and because Susan has the TV on in the background while she sews.

684 hours a month seems like a lot of digital content. But remember, most of Susan’s TV watching is while she’s working on her sewing. She’s being more productive than me. I only watch TV when the TV is on. There are 730 hours in a month, times two, which equals 1,460 hours. That means Susan and I spend over a third of our time using digital content.

$260.37 isn’t a huge monthly expense at all then when you think about how much we get out of it.

Even though that’s not that much for two people, I don’t want to waste money and I want to reduce our monthly bills. I consider anything under $1 an hour to be a good value. We are getting the most bang for the buck with TV. It’s news that’s more expensive.

It’s obvious I need to cancel my subscription to Apple News+. Having access to over 300 magazines seems like a fantastic bargain for $9.99 a month, but I never get around to reading many magazines — even though there are over a dozen I want to read. If I read magazines 30 minutes a day, that would be 15 hours for the month, or 66 cents an hour – in the value range. I need to either read more or cancel.

Apple News+ offers several newspapers. I could drop The New York Times and The Washington Post. I’d probably spend at least 30 minutes a day reading the news, which would bring the value under a dollar an hour. However, I want to support both the Times and Post as institutions. I need to think about this. Apple News+ is a bargain for news reading, but it’s terrible for supporting individual magazines and newspapers.

Calculating how much news I read each day should tell me just how many newspapers and magazines I should buy each month. If I was completely honest with myself, that would be one magazine and one newspaper. I’d probably settled on The Atlantic and The New York Times. But even then, most of their content would go unread. My eyes have always been bigger than my stomach when it comes to periodicals. I’m currently buying WAY MORE newspapers and magazines than anybody could ever read in a month, much less what I actually read.

I’m currently getting The New York Times for $6 a month because I quit to get an introductory rate, but when it goes back to $25 a month I don’t think it’s going to be a reasonable value.

We could probably slash that $260 bill for subscriptions. But seeing these expenses laid out like this is quite revealing. Susan and I hardly ever eat out anymore, and we stopped going to the movies, so this pretty much is our entire entertainment/education budget. It’s not that big, especially when you think it’s just $130 apiece.

JWH

Developing a Healthy News Diet

by James Wallace Harris, 5/21/23

Michael Pollan created a small book about eating healthy called Food Rules. As an analogy, I’d like to create a set of sensible rules about consuming the news. Pollan distilled his list of rules down to three simple sentences, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” but it really takes reading his book to understand that mantra.

What I would like to do is develop a similar simple mantra about my daily news consumption but I’ll have to work out the details first. Pollan emphasized eating whole foods rather than processed foods. Is there such a thing as whole unprocessed news? “Not too much” is an obvious target since we obviously consume too much news. Finding an analogy for “mostly plants” will be interesting.

What would be the equivalent of nutritious news? Experience has taught me that some news is unhealthy, and I often get news indigestion. I also admit I’m bloated and overweight from too much news consumption.

Like whole food and junk food, we prefer junk news over whole news. I spend several hours a day nibbling on news from many sources. Most of which is forgotten immediately. I wonder if my first rule should be:

#1 – Ignore easily forgettable news

We’re used to clicking on anything that catches our fancy while idling away moments on our smartphones. Essentially, this kind of news is gossip and titillation. Basically, we’re bored or restless. We should use that time in better ways, especially if it exercises our minds. Read real news instead. Or, do something active. Playing games, listening to music, or audiobooks, is more nutritious than never-ending bites of clickbait.

Everyone bitches about information overload but who does anything about it? I’ve learned from intermittent fasting that my body appreciates having a good rest each day from eating. I believe I need to apply the same idea to news consumption.

#2 – Limit your hours consuming the news

I find 16:8 fasting works well for eating. I’m thinking of a 22:2 fast for news is what I’m going to aim for at the moment. Two hours of news consumption a day might sound like a lot, but if you add up all the forms of news I consume including television, magazines, online newspapers, YouTube, and news feeds, RSS feeds, I can easily go beyond two hours.

We should also separate news from learning and entertainment. Learning something new could be considered a form of news. I’m not going to count educational pursuits in my news time. And if you enjoy reading nonfiction books or watching documentaries on TV, that shouldn’t count as news either. However, shows like 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning, and The Today Show can be considered informative entertainment news. Some people just prefer news shows for fun rather than watching fictional shows. I’m not sure if they should count or not.

What we really want is to stay informed about the world so that we interact with reality wisely. Humans have an extremely difficult time processing information. We think we’re far smarter than we are. We constantly delude ourselves. And we think our opinions matter when 99.999% of the time they don’t. Most people think they are experts on countless topics after having consumed just a few hours of news. They think they know better than real experts who have put tens of thousands of hours into studying their specialty.

#3 – Stop assuming you know anything

I believe the real key to understanding the news is being able to tell the difference between opinion and significant data. The real goal of news consumption should be finding the best data, and that means getting into statistics.

Unfortunately, the news industry is overwhelmed with talking heads. Everyone wants to be an expert, and all too often most news consumers tend to latch onto self-appointed experts they like. News has become more like a virus than information processing.

I read and watch a lot of columnists and programs about computers, stereo equipment, and other gadgets. Most are based on personal impressions of equipment individuals have bought or been loaned from manufacturers. These tech gurus are a good analogy for what I’m talking about. Most of the news we take in daily is from individuals processing limited amounts of information and giving us their opinion. What we really want is Consumer Reports, Rtings, or the Wirecutter, where large amounts of data are gathered from a variety of sources, and statistically analyzed.

This is just a start on designing my news diet. I want to keep current on a long list of topics, but that’s like learning about all the vitamins and nutrients my body needs. News nutrition will be a vastly more complicated topic. What are the essential vitamins I need every day? Is it politics, national and international affairs, economics, crime, immigration, ecology, etc?

Do I need to know about everything? Is that what an informed citizen needs to do? Take immigration. Is anything I think about immigration affects the situation at the border? Does voting liberal or conservative even affect anything at the border? I can barely maintain order in my house, why should I believe I can organize all of reality on Earth? Maybe my last two rules should be:

#4 – Know my limitations

#5 – Pursue the news I can actually use

Like nutrition, news is a complicated subject that’s hard to understand and can easily confuse.

JWH