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My personal opinion is that reading newspaper editorials daily and weekend reading of Economist (what the author calls pre-Internet habit) is more likely to offer analytical depth than browsing tens of blog sites and following up-to-the-minute trends on Twitter. IMHO, Internet has more breadth but less depth... I would want my young kid to follow the newspaper+Economist habit than bothering about hundreds of ever-changing news stories on Twitter and blogs.

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Yes. I think the author's perspective was limited to reading Indian dailies, which he says have more breath but less depth. But I remember that before Internet days, there were high-quality weeklies and monthlies, which offered more depth that Internet does today.

It's true that I was limited to reading Indian dailies when I grew up. But I believe the point stands. I think if your job is not in journalism or politics, then you have a limited amount of time left to read. And you can choose either to read magazines, which gives you a sample out of a wide spectrum of topics or you can go into depth on, say, the financial reform bill, and sacrifice "breadth."

You have a point. Although what I had in mind wasn't so much the "real-time" stuff that we get from Twitter and random blogs but the extensive analysis that's often offered on blogs like Brad Delong's, Mark Thoma's Economists View, Savage Minds, or The Monkey Cage. I find RortyBomb to be the single-best coverage of the current machinations over financial reform going on in Congress. Of course, if you follow the financial reform bill extensively, you're going to have to sacrifice reading about, say, the latest news on Israel-Iran relations or the latest on the national political scene in India.

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