When I wake up in the morning and the gun goes off, I’m checking Twitter. I’m checking RSS feeds, and I get four newspapers at my house every day. I get the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Star Ledger - because I live in New Jersey - and, of course, the New York Times.
And the reason I do is because the day before this, all this stuff has gone whizzing past me, and I seem to know a lot. But I don’t really know which part of it is important. And I used to think it was so silly that newspapers would - like, I’d go to our page one meeting, and they’d be organizing the hierarchy of the six or seven most important stories in Western civilization. Meanwhile, the Web is above them, pivoting and alighting, and all these stories are morphing and changing. And I thought: Well, how silly is this?
But you know what? I came to want that resting place, where someone yelled stop and decided, look, this is stuff you need to know about going forward. So there’s both real-time news and then newspapers have become a kind of magazine experience for me, where they’re - where it’s a way to look back at what has happened.
The New York Time’s David Carr talking to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross
