I am most interested in stories on the local level because those are the stories that I find most relevant to me and my family. However, I do find myself regularly monitoring major professional sports stories, even outside of the teams I am a fan of. I don’t watch the news on a regular basis; however, I do regularly check in with The Post-Crescent, a local newspaper in my hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin. I love to keep myself updated with high school football in the Fox Valley Area, more specifically, with the high school I graduated from, Appleton West High School. The Post-Crescent also does livestreams of football games in the Fox Valley area, so every Friday, I am tuning into their streams to watch the game they are streaming. Outside of the Post-Crescent, I don’t find myself typing in news sites too often. I read news stories on publications like ESPN, Bleacher Report, Barstool Sports, etc., but all of those publications made access very easy by creating an app, so I typically just head over to their app. The only time I find myself typing in a news site on the internet is for the New York Times, so I can access the Wordle of the day. My favorite news site is Barstool Sports. I know that isn’t a popular answer because some think they aren’t “real journalists,” but the reason I like it is because of the wide variety of journalists they have. Every sports writer there is a fan of a different team, and for me, that makes the stories less biased and also makes for very entertaining stories. Like I said before, I typically don’t use Google as my preferred search engine to find news; I use apps like ESPN. I also get a lot of my news from X, which at times I have to be very careful with because a lot of stuff on there tends to be AI or just people spreading misinformation. This will lead me to go on Google and search to find a credible source for the news. I don’t use AI. I believe that, right now at least, it is not accurate enough to be relied on for things. If it’s little things like, “What can I do to make my LinkedIn bio better?” I’ll do that, but as far as getting news from sites like ChatGPT, there tends to be some misinformation pushed.
When I consume news, I tend to watch more videos than read text. Nowadays, with the internet, we see a lot of short stories, news in videos, or photo slideshows, so I typically consume those most often. With videos, I feel more connected to the story, and I feel that I understand the story more, hearing it from someone else rather than reading about it. I am also a big fan of photo slideshows because, to me, they feel like a movie where one slide will leave you on a cliffhanger, and then you have to go to the next slide to see where it goes.I will sometimes interact with the news by posting a comment on a sports team’s Instagram post. I don’t believe that I have commented on a reporter’s story specifically on their publication’s website. I have never emailed a reporter or submitted any content, but on X, I sometimes will get into conversations with reporters on their stories or some of their content. Social media is the biggest thing that leads me to the news. X leads me to a majority of the news I consume. On X, journalists leave links right to their stories in their posts, and it will take you right to the story without even leaving the app, which I find very accessible. If I don’t find the news on there, I rely on my family to tell me any news I am unaware of. On X, I mostly follow sports journalists at all levels, from high school sports to professional. All of their posts always lead me to their designated news site. I am a huge podcast listener. Whenever I have a long drive somewhere, I always turn on Josh Pate’s College Football Show as a way to make time go by faster. Normally, I believe it’s pretty easy to know if a news story I read was reliable or not. I typically stay with the same couple of news sites that I find to be most credible, but if I am reading something new and I am unsure whether or not it is reliable and credible, I will always fact-check and see what everyone else is saying on the topic. TikTok typically has a lot of misinformation; sometimes it does get me, but most of the time I can catch it and go fact-check it.
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