What being informed looks like

If checking isn't the way to be informed, it's fair to ask what is. This chapter describes the alternative, and it's my own view, offered as one reasonable way of doing it.

Being informed, as I defined it in chapter 1, means understanding something well enough to explain it or act on it. Four things tend to produce that kind of understanding, and headlines supply none of them.

The first is time. An account written a day, a week or a month after an event is almost always better than one written an hour after. The facts have settled, the wrong early reports have been corrected, and someone has had time to find out why it happened. A daily newspaper or an evening bulletin is better than a live page for this reason, and a weekly is better than a daily. For the large questions, a good book written years later is best of all.

The second is length. Understanding needs background, such as who these people are, what happened before, what the competing explanations are, and what's likely to follow. That takes a thousand words or more, and a headline with two paragraphs under it can't do it. One long article on the conflict behind Monday's missile strike would tell you more than a month of updates.

The third is an ending. A newspaper, a magazine, a bulletin and a newsletter all stop. Somebody has decided what matters today and left the rest out, and when you reach the end, you've finished. A feed never gives you that. It also can't tell you what matters, because it's arranged by what's newest and what gets clicked. Part of what you pay an editor for is deciding what to leave out.

The fourth is selection on your part. Nobody can understand everything. Informed people tend to follow a few subjects properly and keep a light general awareness of the rest. You might choose your own country's politics, one region of the world, and one issue you care about, such as climate or health or housing. For those, you read at length and over years, and you come to understand them. For everything else, the front page once a day is plenty.

Here's what that might look like in a week. It's an example and you should build your own.

Once a day, at a set time, you spend twenty minutes on a source that has an end. It might be the evening bulletin on the radio, a morning newsletter from a newspaper you trust, or the front few pages of a paper. When it's finished, you've finished.

Once a week, you read at length. It could be a weekly paper or magazine on a Saturday morning, as Neil does, or two or three long articles you've saved during the week.

Now and then you read a book about one of the subjects you follow.

For your own area, you keep the local sources that carry information you can act on. These are the council's notices, the weather, the school newsletter and the community group. As the crime survey showed, this is the level at which people's knowledge is most accurate and most useful.

And you keep one or two sources of the slow good news that headlines leave out. Several organisations publish long-run data on health, poverty, education and the environment. Looking at them two or three times a year will correct the picture that the daily selection gives you.

A person who did all of that would spend three or four hours a week on the news, against your present seven to ten. They'd understand more of what's going on and be better company when they talked about it. Their view of their own risks would be more accurate, and they'd be calmer.