From March 2015, every week, without missing a single week, I’ve posted a noteworthy news item from the week to a section of my website. More than source for other people to come and read, it was my own way of making myself more aware of the world outside of my own life and the US, to read more about what was going on that I wasn’t aware of.
And almost always, my weekly searching for stories and my regular reading-up on current events for the section of the website helped me do exactly what I wanted to do. I was more aware of current events, I’d forced myself to try to understand them rather than just skim the headlines, and I was making myself read stories I wouldn’t normally be interested in.
But as I expanded my horizons this way, I realized something else that made it increasingly difficult to find the right stories for the section. Current events isn’t a singlar narrative. What we call current events is really a crowdsourced, hand-picked selection of the top hundreds of stories in a world where there are tens of billions of stories every single day worth learning something from, and worth taking action by. And to try to capture just one “best” story from that selection became increasingly difficult, and as I was picking one each week, I couldn’t help feeling biased.
But I’m not a journalist, barely a blogger, and TLT isn’t a news website – it’s a blog. So trying to tell and share more stories I found noteworthy wasn’t going to happen.
There isn’t such a thing as a “best news story”, and I wasn’t going to force myself to pick one each week. So while the Newsroom section helped me do exactly what I wanted to do, as I developed the right habits and picking stories became more of a meaningless chore, I decided to shut down Newsroom, leaving its archive as an older part of the website.
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