As part of their series on ‘media diets’, The Atlantic Wire is ask­ing a num­ber of media lumi­nar­ies how they man­age the del­uge of infor­ma­tion we all encounter online.

Some names you’ll recog­nise include David Brooks, Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen and the fol­low­ing from Clay Shirky dis­cussing his dis­taste for ‘break­ing news’:

In gen­eral, there’s no real break­ing news that mat­ters to me. I don’t have any alerts or noti­fi­ca­tions on any piece of soft­ware I use. My phone is on silent ring, noth­ing alerts me when I get a Tweet and my e-mail doesn’t tell me when mes­sages arrive.

I also don’t read any of the big tech aggre­ga­tors. Know­ing that, for instance, Google just bought Blog­ger, isn’t that use­ful for me to hear today rather than tomor­row. Some of Michael Arrington’s stuff I think is an exam­ple of the worst kind of break­ing news. The kind of Apple Insider stuff where they pub­lish some­thing every day to sat­isfy the news cycle. It’s gos­sip cov­er­age like fol­low­ing movie stars and it dis­tracts me from think­ing longer form thoughts. […]

What are my guilty plea­sures? Given the fact that media’s my job—I don’t feel much guilt. There’s no equiv­a­lent of eat­ing Häagen-Dazs out of the box. […] That’s the thing about this job. If you think about it, I sup­pose the guilty plea­sure is gar­den­ing or cook­ing. It’s about get­ting away from media con­sump­tion and mak­ing lin­guine instead.

Of all of the arti­cles in the series, Shirky’s is the ‘diet’ my own is clos­est to.

via @cojadate