This image was originally posted to Flickr by IntelFreePress at https://www.flickr.com/photos/54450095@N05/8100180994. It was reviewed on 31 August 2013 by FlickreviewR and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-sa-2.0.
8:15 am – Woke Up. This is a much later start than I usually get in the mornings, but my wife let me sleep in. I look at my phone to check the time and my messages. I have 3 notifications. The first, posted just after midnight from CNN announces Kathy Hochul as the new governor of New York. The second, a video from the Weather Channel about a road collapse. I also received a Facebook notification that my friend Gordon had added to his stories. While trying to swipe up to see if there were any more messages, I accidentally clicked on the Facebook alert and I see Gordon and his partner enjoying breakfast on a balcony in Iceland. Normally I would keep scrolling and see what my Facebook friends were up to, but I have to get a move on.
8:30 am – While I am making coffee I open up the notification from the Weather Channel. The road collapse was in China and appeared to be weather-related. I had thought it might have happened in the South, Tennessee or the Carolinas, having driven through the remnants of Tropical Storm Henri last week while visiting my son in Georgia. I don’t get into disaster porn, but I will share extreme weather event stories to highlight the multi-faceted threats posed by climate change. I decided not to share this video since I didn’t have time to research the story or to develop a nuanced take. I check the app for upcoming weather in my area and around the US. There is a tropical wave in Caribbean with a high probability of development. That wave became Hurricane Ida.
8:35 am – I log on to Canvas on my laptop and start organizing my day’s tasks.
9:18 am – That loud sound outside our house is happening again. (No, not the cicadas, the other loud sound.) It’s like a generator with a loose fan belt and it runs day and night for the last two weeks. I google “noise pollution, NJ” to get a phone number and lodge a complaint. I also learn from the search results on nj.com that the Federal Bureau of Statistics finds New Jersey one of the loudest areas on the East Coast. I call my county office and I’m told that someone will be out to investigate later in the day.
9:30 am – After the phone call, I check my email – it’s mostly junk mail. I then sit at my desk and open up the book, “Our Iceberg is Melting” by John Kotter, an enchanting fable about taking action when confronted with changing conditions and an assigned reading for my MCO 431-Media Entrepreneurship course.
10:30 am – I put down the book and head into the shower. This is usually the time of day that I catch up with my podcast subscriptions. This particular morning I pulled up a link for an “On the Media” segment titled: The Rise and Fall of Fake News that was mentioned in the article by Claire Waddle, “Fake News, It’s Complicated.” I popped on my waterproof speaker and hopped in the shower.
10:45 am – As both my shower and the NPR segment were ending, an amazing thing happened. The feed switched to a livestream of WNYC where the discussion was the big news in NY – the first day of the new NY Governor, Kathy Hochul. I listened intently as I dried off. I kept the feed going until the top of the hour.
11am-1pm – I read an assigned text from my FMS300 Television Studies class – The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs by George Lipsitz. It is 35 pages and I take detailed notes.
1pm – I receive news alerts from HuffPost and CNN that Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones had died. Normally, I would visit those sites for details if the death was unexpected. I knew that he had been ill for quite some time so I simply asked Siri to play some Rolling Stones. (And she did)
1:30 pm – I eat lunch and read through the daily snail mail. I received a violations notice from NY Toll Authorities that my EZ-Pass hadn’t registered when I went through the Lincoln Tunnel. Technology is amazing, when it works. When it doesn’t, it’s a real hassle.
2:00 pm – 4pm – I watched the Module 2 lectures and excerpts of early TV for my FMS300 class. The clips included scenes from The Honeymooners and The Goldbergs.
4 pm – Cooked dinner for the family, and continued listening to The Rolling Stones from my iPhone.
6:00 pm -12:30 am – I go out to drive for Uber. I have SiriusXM radio in car which I leave on a station called Chill, gentle techno beats when I have passengers. When I am alone in the car, I alternate between MSNBC and Netflix is a Joke Radio. I like the fact that MSNBC repeats their evening line up after midnight so I can catch the parts I’ve missed while driving passengers.
1:00 am – I check over my phone before going to sleep. I received a CNN notification that two Congressmen have made an unexpected trip to Afghanistan complicating evacuation logistics. It’s been a long day so I put my phone to charge and turn off the light.
I find that I consume a lot less outside media while I am focusing on my college courses. Somehow the really big stories, like the new NY Governor and the death of Charlie Watts come at me from so many directions, I am compelled to pay attention. In ranking the news media sources I accessed on this day I would rank their credibility on a scale of 1-10 in the following order:
WNYC – 10
The Weather Channel – 9
CNN – 7
MSNBC -7
NJ.Com – 5
HuffPost – 3
I have listened to WNYC and NPR for many years. The Weather Channel is bringing Climate Change information into the mainstream. CNN and MSNBC are reliable, but editorialize too much. NJ.com is very uneven. I used to rely on Huffington Post as a trusted news source, now I simply need to find out how to turn off notifications from them.
