Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Dalliance With Newspapers Ends


My day job in communications requires me to be on top of the happenings in my sector. I therefore need to monitor daily newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, online news sources, electronic media in the form of radio, TV and internet sources. This has therefore made me an ardent and voracious reader of newspapers on a daily basis. In a day, I have to peruse the Daily Nation, Standard, Star, People Daily, Kenya Times and Taifa. At the beginning of the week I also have to look at East Africa and Kenya Today as well as any other periodicals like Time, Ecomonist and Newsweek even as time has to be created for trade journals. I have gouged myself with information for years on end and it has tremendously increased my knowledge on various subjects. I dont wear this on my sleeves though it gives me a lot of satisfaction. 

After close to two decades of this kind of life, I have recently started to evaluate my relationship with newspapers. In view of the internet's ubiquitous shadow on our lives, I am starting to feel like the newspaper is "behind news" literally. Last weekend I decided not to buy the dailies hoping that life would be unbearable by mid-afternoon. After all, this has been my routine for ages. My weekend is not complete before I go through the two papers cover to cover! So nothing happened. Three days later, I have no interest in looking at the five dailies in the office. I want to push this for another few weeks and I can then say that am rid of my thirst and dalliance with the papers.

After all five minutes on facebook, another ten on this or that blog aggregator another five on google news is all I need to know what is happening everywhere in the country and the world.