A few days ago I put a new item on my list of new year commitments – to follow the three strikes rule from Swyx to write and publish more. Yesterday I had the first occurrence of the three strikes and instead of doing the “old me” thing and postponing actually writing up a post for months and months, I decided to write up and publish this right away, to go into the new year building new habits straightaway.
There are two kinds of information that I consume under “reading the news” umbrella:
- Actual news – “what” happened.
- Analysis and opinion – why events happened, the details of what happened, implications and projections into the future
Current events
For the first one, the task is just to get information about what happened. Any news aggregator, or even just X can do just fine in this regard. Another approach is to skim (not read in full!) the newspaper websites that are relevant to the part of the world you are in and ones you care about. Personally I usually skim New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Bloomberg for global coverage, BBC for local, FD (Het Financieele Dagblad) for Dutch news, Handelsblatt for German news, South China Morning Post for Asian news, Ukrainska Pravda and Hromadske for Ukrainian news, RBC and Kommersant for Russian news. I also read Hacker News, news.smol.ai, TLDR AI and Simon Willison’s blog for industry news. While it may look like a long list, it typically takes just 10-15 minutes to skim them.
It is important to note that even the most reputable sources, newspapers and journalists are biased, at the very least in terms of their worldview, and this is why it is so useful to have multiple sources as it helps to separate facts and observations from opinions.
Analysis and opinions
Just knowing what happened is useful but it is not enough, and that’s where the second kind of information comes in. I used to split it into two, analysis and opinions, but very quickly realized it is a wrong split – every analysis comes with opinion, and every opinion piece is actually attempt at some sort of analysis. I found another way to split this category – view on the past events (understanding of why and clarity on how something happened) and predictions for the future. In practice, this split doesn’t matter that much, it is a matter of personal preference.
Material that falls into this category cannot be written quickly. It requires thinking, reflection, and often time is needed to even see how the events unfold properly. This is why a lot of useful materials for this category are found in weekly and monthly publications and on Substacks, not in daily newspapers. I am subscribed to a lot of sources of such information, but I only invest time in reading a very small part of it, otherwise it would be a complete information overflow.
In this kind of materials the point made above regarding bias is even more important. Even the best analysis articles contain interpretation, and that interpretation is always made from certain point of view. But understanding different points of view, and understanding people who hold them for me is a very important aspect of reading this content, probably as important as the factual part of it.
I read the following sources for such information: Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Ben Thompson (Stratechery), The Terminalist, Sebastian Raschka, Semianalysis, Marc Rubinstein, and Opinion columns in the daily newspapers. I also have a running list of materials that people I know and respect recommend to me.
I usually spend a few hours every week reading this kind of materials.
I know a lot of people listen to podcasts for this kind of information, and occasionally I do too, but generally I find printed information much easier to understand, digest and deeply think about. AI advancements made it much easier for me to consume podcasts, and I can just now generate full text transcripts and then turn them into “article” like material very easily.
Books are key foundation
All of the above is not very useful if one doesn’t have a good, strong foundation and point of reference. While I spend a bit of time for reading all the above, I try to spend most of my reading time in books. Reading history, philosophy, biographies and classical literature makes it so much easier to understand the current events, as history does indeed tend to rhyme. While I can provide some recommendations in this section as well, I think it deserves a whole separate post which I will write at a later time.
Why do I bother myself with this?
Reading and consuming news-like information has been an important part of my life since teenager years. Partially this is because we live in such turbulent times where a lot of news are applicable to our own lives directly. Partially because my work is very much dependent on how the world economy, financial system and tech industry advances, and we live at a time where breaking news happen every couple of weeks or even days in my industry. To be fair, I think the term “breaking news” will need revisiting in this case, but news of importance happens much more often than even 5 years ago.
Lastly, I strongly believe that through our actions every single one of us can shape the world around us, and to shape it for the better, to use this agency responsibly, we need to understand this world. And “understanding” doesn’t mean just knowing the facts (otherwise math and physics and chemistry and other STEM sciences would be enough), and in context of news it doesn’t mean just knowing what happened. It also means deeply understanding how people think and perceive current events, why they feel this way, and how the current events and their interpretations moves the public.
Ivan Kavalerov 