Ask HN: How do you read a newspaper daily? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you read a newspaper daily?

2 pointsakadeb6 comments

Hi HN, I just got an NYTimes subscription and they have some fantastic news articles. I want to make it a point to read the whole paper but I think I am a slower-than-average reader and I am able to read 5-6 articles in close to half an hour.

How do you manage to read your newspaper daily? Do you read the full-thing? Have you trained yourself to be a fast reader? Do you have any advice on how I can read quicker? I often read out aloud and that seems to help but quite likely it makes me slower.

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I learned recently that to read faster your eyes should move LESS. Your eyes are constantly twitching and that makes reading slower. You can’t stop that but you can reduce it by moving your eyes less. At least that’s how I understand it.

So how to do it? Take a page/column of text and break it up into 3 smaller columns. Do this either in your head or physically on the paper. Then look at the center of the first column but read all the words on the first row with your peripheral vision, without moving your eyes. Do the same with the next column and the next until you’ve finished that row of text and move down to the next row of text. Repeat. It took some practice and at first I was slower, but much sooner than I expected I became a faster reader than my wife, who has always been much faster than me.

That's cool, thanks for the response! So the idea is you only move your eyes to three columns? Do you also find that you gather the same amount from your reading?

Yup that’s the idea, your eyes should only move 3 times per row of text. I read quite a lot, both fiction and nonfiction, and I’m getting the same experience just faster. I’m not losing comprehension, retention, or imagination, though when reading fiction I’ve never spent much time trying to imagine scenery and whatnot, even when reading sci-fi/fantasy. So maybe if you really spend time and effort picturing in your mind what’s happening on the page, maybe you’d lose that but idk, the human brain is incredibly fast

I go to https://www.nytimes.com/timeswire, skim the top 10-20 article blurbs and open 5-7 in tabs. I never read every article in the paper. I skim news (not just NYT: WSJ, FT, Guardian, some local papers) twice a day. Most news articles are written in inverted funnel format so I read the first couple of paragraphs and decide whether or not to read the rest of the article.

You don't have to read the whole damned thing.

There are sections you may fully ignore. The front page / first section, and selected other bits, may be of interest.

One of the prime affordances of a newspaper or other print publication is that when you're done with it, you bundle and recycle the whole damned thing. No mass of tabs sitting lying in guilt for you.

If something's important enough, it'll come around again.

What is your intent in subscribing to a paper? How is thaat intent serrved?

I don't read the whole paper, I tend to flick through it taking note of articles I want to go deeper on and then go back and review the articles. I read digitally, so I take advantage of integrations to other services like Instapaper if available.

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