By JENNA MEAD
STAFF WRITER
The New York Times serves as a type confetti to campus. The paper is the leader in journalism, no doubt, but I have found it common place to find the papers acting more like props for our intellectual environment. (The Hill News serves as the campus’ secondary paper of journalistic excellence, but we know you loyal readers read this cover to cover). Even as a self-proclaimed semi-pro journalist, there is no possible way to consume all that is news. Enter The Skimm.
The Skimm is a daily email service that serves to solve your dilemma of being informed and being a functioning social human being, as well as being a college student. The email arrives in the early morning for a quick read through to prep you for knowing what is going on in the world. I particularly enjoy the service’s casual approach. It does not look to over explain or inflate its language in order to appeal to “worldly news readers.” Instead, it catches its readers up on the top stories in an understandable, digestible fashion.
I had my doubts about the site for a while. How could I, someone who studies the news and studies the complexities of crafting a public message, simply consume the news at this surface level? I was at a moral crossroads. I would only be contributing to the killing of true journalism in the process. But, in my attempt to gain a firm grasp of the world’s events without The Skimm, the result was only a tunnel-vision view of the stories that had time to enter my sphere. I decided to give it a try.
The service does take a cut into the real world of journalism, but I believe that it is an alternative to the much worse reality: a world of uninformed individuals. With The Skimm, we can all be a little more aware. With this awareness, interest can be sparked leading to further investigation. The Skimm can be the gateway for many who rely on Facebook trending hashtags for their headlines to instead gain a little context and potentially find themselves reading full articles, as The Skimm says, “Things Riling People Up.”
Hopefully you made it through this article long enough to know you never have to read an entire one again. Subscribe to The Skimm for daily email newsletters. Enjoy its “we’re no better than you” attitude and finally know what your professor is referencing in the Middle East. Since we are all too busy to read the paper we ambitiously picked up, let The Skimm do the deep reading while you catch up on your friend’s latest Ticker tragedy, because that is just too good to miss.
Have you seen Briefing (http://briefi.ng)? It offers a refreshing approach to the daily news, appealing to readers beyond the Skimm’s target audience as it employs beautiful, minimalistic design to help them understand complex world issues quickly and in context.