My Morning Reads [Part One]

I'll admit that I read fewer and fewer books. It's not that I'm not reading; currently, I read the books for my Xavier classes and for the CCU courses that I'm teaching. But I've started to much more from the internet. Over the past couple of years I've established a daily reading regimen that I've designed to get me the information I think I need to do my job. It's a little overdue, but I thought I'd devote a couple of posts to letting people know my daily informational intake.

First and foremost, do yourself a favor and download the Firefox web browser. It has the pluggins that make web browsing a pleasure and, if you're a fellow Mac user, there are plenty of shortcuts that make navigating your browser a snap [here's a quick example: hit "Apple+k" and your cursor immediately goes to the Google searchbar]. I have a toolbar bookmark labeled "morning" that opens up my list daily reading items in separate tabs. Here's what I check out, and the categories I assign to them:

COTTON CANDY

1. Facebook. I like to start my morning with a warm up before diving head-first into things. I try to check Facebook out about two times daily. That way I can leave a smart-alec update and see who is[n't] dating whom.

2. Lance McAlister's Blog. Lance is a sports radio talkshow host here in Cincinnati. He does a good job of linking to different articles pertinent to Cincy Sports.

LOCAL READS

3. The Cincinnati Enquirer. I feel it's important to know what's going on in our city, so I have to hit up the local paper. The Enquirer's parent couple recently changed the websites for all of their papers. The new layout is excruciatingly horrible. As a result, I'll only scan the frontpage to see if there are articles of interest.

4. Cincy Nation. This is basically a local news aggregate with a liberal stance. They have a good amount of non-Enquirer local articles linked here, ones that I might not find otherwise.

NATIONAL NEWS

5. The New York Times. Since they started putting all their content online, I've enjoyed reading the paper. I can stomach the rather one-sided reporting as almost every article is usually well-written.

6. The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ has some content available online, but requires you to pay for the really good stuff. Hence, I scan the front page for the freebies.

7. The Washington Post. This one is so I can figure out what's happening on the national political landscape.

A LITTLE BIT OF EVERYTHING

8. Digg. Yes, it has its own culture that I refuse to get involved in [I've probably only dugg about a dozen articles on the site], but it has an eclectic mix of articles from all over the web.

9. Google Reader. This is the next step of my reading regimine, as I scan through my RSS subscriptions. I've written about RSS feeds before— it's an easy way to quickly read through numerous blogs— but in part two, I'll let you know the types of blogs to which I subscribe.