For the past week and a half I have been trying a little experiment with my media consumption habits.  I decided to go on a media diet and consume my news and information from online sources only.

I was well equipped electronically to begin my experiment as I use a Blackberry, a WiFi equipped laptop and a desktop PC at both home and at work.   I must admit that professionally, I was already fairly geared towards receiving my industry news and information via my admittedly excessive subscriptions to enewsletters and assorted RSS feeds.  I also have Facebook, Twitter and Linked In accounts and my iGoogle page configured to all the things I care about.  But I do tend to depend on various traditional sources for my local and international news as well as for personal interests, so I spent some time setting up my online alerts to be more inclusive of my total appetite of news and information needs.  Among these set-ups included keyword alerts at TweetLater.com, setting up additional email alerts from Google Email, and adding some RSS feeds to my Google Reader account.  I definitely felt sufficiently wired.

And what I experienced was sufficiently thorough.  Maybe too thorough!  For all of the keywords, topics and companies that I tagged to follow I felt as though I was getting what there was to know about them in my week and a half and I felt satisfied that I was properly tapped in.  But I have also decided that I could use a personal editor of sorts that could weed through the volumes of content and decide what was really important for me to read and what made it to the e-pile because if the way I had my filters set-up.  If due to a busy workload I had missed many of my alerts for the day, I felt overwhelmed when I turned my attention to them due to the sheer volume to sort through.

The convenience factor is hard to beat, however.  Having all of my sources literally at my fingertips at most moments of the day is priceless.  I found myself finding all sorts of unused, previously “wasted” pockets of time to grab a news alert here and there as I went through my day.  I read the morning news headlines while waiting for my kids to gather their belongings and head to the car in the mornings, I checked the weather for the rest of the week while the woman behind the counter made my lunch order and I pondered potential dinner recipes from my daily recipe feed while I was waiting at the doctors office.  Perhaps I am a bit spoiled, however, by my tech toys and I can’t help wonder if I would have liked my experience as well if I did not have the luxury of the portability I had in the handheld or laptop.  I doubt I would have dedicated as much time to my sources if I had to rely solely on my desktop computer.

What I felt overall through this experiment was a nagging pang for the loss of an experience.  I truly missed some of my traditional sources of news and information such as my weekly edition of People magazine and my daily morning habit of The Wall Street Journal and the experience of the moment when I am engaging with one of those sources.  One of the things that steered my into my career is my love of magazines.  Curling up with one of my favorite magazines is a treasured moment of down-time for me that I missed in this experiment.  Granted, I received my daily People e-headlines so I didn’t feel that I was uninformed during this experiment, but I did not feel the same emotional experience getting it from the screen as I usually do from the printed version read in a completely different setting.  My mornings were hard.  For thirty years I have grown up with the Wall Street Journal on the breakfast table and out of all the media outlets I touch in a day I would have to say this was one thirty-year habit that was difficult to break.  Again, I was receiving my appointed e-alerts to the news that mattered to me, but there was an element of the experience that I missed.  I can assure you that as of tomorrow, I am going to be reading the hard-copy of my morning Journal and my issue of People magazine this week, but I think I will continue to follow most of the feeds I have set-up and work on culling them down to the really important bites.