New(s) Routines

Up until about 2005, a popular Sunday morning ritual was to sort through and consume throughout the day, about five pounds of newsprint. There were always the things you went to first. For some people it was the comics, for some it was the magazine, some the art section, food section. Now algorithms do this for you, but essentially what's happening is that it's like the Sunday paper with various sections wrapped on the outside, mostly the ads, not the News. The ads and newsletters from your friends are now the "news", or what leads you to certain kinds of "news" based on things you would buy on sale, or read first after sorting it. This is why I still like doing the sorting after I've decided how the electronic version of that five-pound brick gets delivered, and how I spend my Sunday afternoon and evening.

When did news become "The News"? At least in the corpus of scanned books, "The News" first spiked in World War II:

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#dailyroutines #rituals