One of the problems with the subscription model in journalism is that news consumers who choose to subscribe to an outlet — or outlets, depending on their budget — know full well that their choice is not the only outlet from which they will be getting their news.

Let’s say I can only afford to pay around $5 a month for a subscription and the New York Times happens to be one of my favorite news sources. Hmm, perfect! I can get a basic digital NYT subscription for $1 a week — with the student discount.

Although I would feel good about supporting at least one news organization, I know I would be getting a lot of my news, or maybe most of it, from other sources, including two or three news outlets in New Jersey, several magazines and national newspapers and a whole variety of outlets I may find on Twitter or elsewhere.

What if there was a system for me to distribute my $5 through multiple news organizations?

Well, that is exactly what Brazil’s chapter of Open Knowledge International is trying to do with Libre, a technology created to facilitate small financial contributions to digital news outlets. And it allows consumers to do so by the click of a button, essentially “liking” different news stories or organizations as they see fit.  The microfinancing technology, which is in beta testing, also aims to foster a closer relationship between individual journalists and their audience.

The donation button appears on editorial pages of participating news sites and invites readers to click, just like the social media buttons invite readers to share the content. To donate, readers must register on Libre’s website and choose a monthly plan, which ranges from about R$20 to R$500 (about $6 to $157), according to the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

Subscribers then allocate their money in “Libres,” or LBR, the platform’s digital currency (not to be confused with cryptocurrency; this is not on a blockchain). Each Libre is worth R$1 (about $0.31). If readers don’t distribute all of their monthly finds, the balance is split evenly among the organizations or writers that they “liked.”

“We believe that Libre offers a particularly simple and direct solution to sample the audience and the relevance they attribute to content. It’s an intuitive, familiar kind of interface in this timeline environment and post-to-post information consumption,” the platform founders told the Knight Center in a statement in September.

The group includes Bruno Torturra, of journalism studio Fluxo, Thiago Rondon from AppCivico and Ariel Kogan of Open Knowledge Brasil.

The outlets currently testing Libre on their websites are all fairly new. They include Aos Fatos, a fact-checking agency; Gastrolândia, a gastronomy news site; and Gênero e Número, a data-driven news magazine focused on gender equality stories.

The beauty of this system, in my opinion, is that it puts power in the hands of the subscriber, allowing them to support journalism from organizations they might otherwise never do if they’re only able to subscribe to one outlet at a time. Even if it seems like a very small donation, or a tip, the more people who subscribe and start using the tool, the more support participating news outlets will have.

In addition, this mechanism would hopefully encourage and help finance quality journalism, assuming that Libre subscribers would donate to journalists and organizations that produce important and high-quality content, not those dedicated to click-bait posts, for instance.

It is also a crucial time to support independent journalism in Brazil, where the press is going through a serious financial and credibility crisis. But at the same time, as Libre states on its website, there have never been as many media outlets and initiatives exploring the possibilities of network journalism.

I learned about Libre after reading about Festival 3i, an event featuring innovative, inspiring and independent journalism initiatives that took place in Rio de Janeiro this month. The festival and all the ideas that were presented are absolutely encouraging and I hope to write about some of those other initiatives in the days and weeks to come. And I’ll definitely keep an idea on Libre, which I really hope goes mainstream.

Jonah Peretti’s path to leading one of the biggest digital media companies of our time, known as BuzzFeed, was all but ordinary.

He’s not a journalist, but his company has broken many huge news stories in recent years. He’s not a businessman, but he owns an extremely successful organization. He’s not a psychologist, but he seems to understand people’s online behavior better than most of his peers in the industry.

Peretti, a 43-year-old entrepreneur from California, has some really interesting attributes that make him, in my opinion, one of the most admirable media innovators of our time. He’s curious, he likes change and he’s not afraid to experiment or push the boundaries.

A little background on him will help you understand what I mean: Peretti has a degree in environmental sciences from the University of California. After he graduated in 1996, he taught computer science at a New Orleans high school and later left that job to study at the MIT Media Lab.

While at MIT in early 2001, he became known for an email exchange with Nike, which went viral after he forwarded it to a few friends, who forwarded it to some of their friends and so on. The emails showed his unsuccessful attempts to order a pair of Nike shoes with the word “sweatshop” printed on them. The viral messages landed him an interview on the Today Show. It was a turning point in his career, one that led to several other experimental projects he developed to test what would go viral.

He was told by several people he could not replicate the success of the viral Nike emails, but he was determined to try it again and he succeeded. With each project, the timeline to spread got shorter, from months to weeks to days.

It became clear at that point that Peretti was obsessed with a question many in the media failed to ask for years and years. He wanted to find out what it meant that the audience became the distribution system and how the media should handle that change.

In a July interview with Guy Raz for NPR’s “How I Built This” podcast, Peretti said he wanted to figure out why people shared things, what value they got from doing so, what kind of content caught their attention and — the million-dollar question — what would happen to the media and entertainment industry if the distribution of content was dictated by users sharing things with each other.

“The audience became the network,” he told Raz. “I felt like that was a big shift… What does it mean that a student can reach millions of people without a gatekeeper blessing it?”

Peretti was asking the right questions at the right time.

In 2005, he co-founded The Huffington Post, where he tried to figure out how to make the publication popular on the internet. We surely know how well that went. In a 2014 interview on Medium, he described his HuffPost work as a constant evolution amid ever-changing business strategies.

“HuffPost, like any other company, had to keep reinventing itself, and changing its model, and evolving, and building technology, and moving from linking out to other sites on the web to making more content,” Peretti said in the Medium interview.

In 2006, as more and more people were trying to create viral content online, Peretti started BuzzFeed as a side project — a lab where he could experiment with and track viral online content. Five years later, he joined BuzzFeed full-time after AOL bought the HuffPost. BuzzFeed — which started as a collection of listicles, memes and cat videos — has since turned into a media giant and it’s now worth at least $1.7 billion.

Peretti’s early understanding that the audience was changing the media industry was crucial to his success. But his vision wouldn’t be enough without a lot of hard work, curiosity and his willingness to experiment, take risks and constantly adapt.

“I like to be working in sectors where there’s no clear model to find yet, where things like social and mobile and online video or things that are still evolving so quickly that there’s not a clear, stable business there yet. I like to be in the kind of places where things are being formed,” Peretti told Medium. 

To listen to Peretti’s interview on “How I Built This,” click here:

If I were to launch a startup, I have no doubt that my biggest challenge would be money. That may be the case for most people, but I’ve never been great at managing my own finances, so exploring all different funding sources will undoubtedly take me a lot of my time.

With that in mind, there are a few things I have to seriously consider including in my Studio 20’s startup feasibility report. But let me first step back and update you on my latest (and hopefully final) startup idea.

I have decided not to pursue the tech news app idea that I briefly considered earlier this semester. My plan now is to launch a data journalism team, The Data Squad, who will produce data-driven news stories for short-staffed local newsrooms in undercovered parts of the country.

The team would create stories from start to finish: collecting, compiling, cleaning and analyzing data; producing articles, videos, charts, audio, infographics, interactive features or any other form that would work well with a story; and create a distribution plan so that the story is widely shared and to maximize impact. Many of the skills required for that work are missing in struggling newsrooms around the country, so Squad would provide a much-needed resource for those communities. Our clients would be the local newsrooms, which would pay us for the whole story package.

Before going into details about the Squad’s operations, let’s get straight to the cash problem. Here are five things I’m considering to manage my budget in the first year of business:

1. Office space? Um, no.
   News organizations like NJ Spotlight and Patch, which have been around for years, do not have office spaces. So why should a new startup that doesn’t need large hardware or a studio have an office right away? At least for the first year, I think our team can work from home, coffee shops, libraries and co-working spaces, for instance. That means we won’t have to pay for rent, electricity, water, wifi and other utilities. Another reason not to have a physical space is that this startup would be traveling to produce stories outside of New York.
2. Find a co-founder
   Two brains are better than one, the old saying goes. Having no experience in launching a business and little experience in fancy data visualization software, I would greatly benefit from working with at least one partner. I also wouldn’t quit my day job right away — not for the first six months, at least — so two people working part-time is better than one person working part-time.
3. Start small
   As I mentioned above, the Data Squad would start as a very small organization. During the first six months, I would hope to spend at least 20 hours on it every week, but probably no more than 30. In addition, I don’t believe I would invest in advertising at all during in the beginning. The goal for the first few months is to build a brand, by refining business model, producing work that will serve as featured examples on our website and creating connections with key journalists around the country who may start spreading the word about our work. As for hirings, I believe two highly-skilled full-time data journalists would be enough to start. If additional manpower is needed, we could seek freelancers.
4. Equipment and software
   There are some basic computer programs and equipment that our team would need to produce dig through data and produce cutting-edge visual stories. Although I would refrain from making a big investment in the beginning, I believe we would definitely need: at least two work laptops with Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Office, Tabula, Chartbuilder, Datawrapper, Inkscape and others; and at least one audio recorder and two DSLR cameras with microphones, tripods and other necessary parts.
5. Kickstarter
   Given that this startup would ideally help inform and strengthen undercovered communities across the country, I believe the project has a great chance of drawing financial support through a Kickstarter campaign. A 2015 report by the Pew Research Center found that interest in crowdfunding journalism is growing and many journalism crowdfunding campaigns take place on Kickstarter. The report found that more than 170 journalism projects were funded on Kickstarter in 2015, up from 17 in 2009. The amount of money given to those projects also grew: from less than $50,000 in 2009 to more than $1.7 million in 2015.
6. The L-word
   This is the most unpleasant part, but it’s probably inevitable. In order to pay for a team of data journalists to get this work done, even if it’s a two- or three-person team, I have to consider taking out a loan — even typing the word bothers me. I don’t like loans because I currently owe a lot in student loans and it’s crazy how high the interest rates are. However, if Kickstarter is not enough I would consider reaching out to banks and try to find the lowest interest rates available in the market.

So what would those numbers be? How much do I need to launch The Data Squad? Honestly, I don’t know. But I think it would be somewhere between $70,000 and $100,000 for the first six months. (Is that crazy? Or crazy low?)

Anyway, I calculated about $8,000 for equipment and software for the two full-time data journalists. Their annual salaries would range from a low of $45,000 (I don’t think I would get anyone qualified for less than that) and $65,000, depending on experience. I would also like to have a budget for freelancers — about $10,000 for those first six months — and another $10,000 in a bank account for travel expenses and unplanned expenses. My partner and I would have no salary until the business is profitable and we would handle the website ourselves.

These numbers will most likely change until my feasibility report is done in a few weeks, but that’s where things stand right now. I have a lot to learn when it comes to starting a business and money, as I said, will be the main obstacle.

Before joining Studio 20 this semester, I never paid attention to how nonprofit news organizations operate or how popular their business model has become. Honestly, I probably didn’t pay much attention to business models in general. But it has become clear to me that nonprofit news is an attractive, though imperfect, model that is taking quite a few different shapes around the country and the world.

The model has several advantages. One of them is not having that pressure to maximize profits, which allows journalists to spend more time and resources on stories that matter to the public, instead of those that draw the most page views. It allows journalists to spend more time carefully reporting one story, instead of having them produce numerous click-bait stories a day. (Just check the Texas Tribune and ProPublica and let me know if you see any news about the Kardashians.)

Another key advantage of the nonprofit model is that it forces news outlets to engage with their communities. As we often bring up in our Studio 20 classes, these outlets need to grow their audience engagement so that the public understands their value and eventually supports ($$$) their mission. The relationship translates into more events, more interaction between the outlet and its audience and a better understanding of each other.

As for challenges, though, trying to find money is clearly a huge deal. Foundations have played a major role in funding nonprofit news sites, but those outlets eventually learn they need to diversify their revenue sources. Philanthropic entities like the Knight Foundation and Ford Foundation have been pouring a lot of money into nonprofit news sites and projects in recent years, and so are small and big donors.

ProPublica, perhaps the best known nonprofit investigative journalism organization in the U.S., received $750,000 in small donation in the month following the 2016 presidential election, according to the New York Times. The figure is 50 percent higher than what ProPublica raised from small-dollar donors in the entire year of 2015 — about $500,000, the report says.

When it comes to foundation funds, nonprofit news organizations should be aware of some new competition. Major for-profit news organizations are now competing for a slice of the pie. The New York Times and the Guardian, for instance, announced in the summer that they are each launching philanthropic divisions to secure nonprofit funds for their journalism.

As the commercial model becomes less and less sustainable in journalism, I believe the nonprofit model will gradually turn into a much larger part of the news ecosystem. Of course the proliferation of nonprofits could bring many problems, since foundations and big donors have agendas and some may try to influence editorial decisions. But news organizations will have to learn to deal with those issues as they arise. The industry is not new to navigating ethical issues.

Meanwhile, many nonprofit local news sites around the country are experimenting with new ways to diversify their revenues. Here are two of my favorites from this week’s readings: a subscription model that charges as much as $97 a month and a really interesting partnership between a nonprofit site and a commercial newspaper.

Asking readers for money and engagement may sound like an unreasonable request by a news organization. After all, the internet is filled with free content, right?

Well, by now I do hope that the public is finally realizing that good journalism costs money and is worth investing on. There are many positive signs around the world that such a mindset is taking shape, such as a Brazilian news site that appears to have found a successful formula for funding and engagement.

Agência Pública (based in my home country) is currently seeking support for the third edition of its crowdfunded investigative series, Reportagem Pública. Founded in 2011, the organization describes itself as Brazil’s first nonprofit investigative journalism center. Its high-quality investigation stories, most of which focus on human rights issues, are published by a network of more than 60 news organizations under a Creative Commons License.

The first two editions of its crowdfunded project, in 2013 and 2015, resulted in 24 investigations financed by more than 1,700 supporters.  Readers who donate to the Reportagem Pública series become members of an editorial advisory board and get to vote on which stories the agency should pursue.

As part of the two editions of the project, the agency looked into a new wave of private prisons in Brazil; showed how death squads in the city of Salvador targeted black youngsters; found that most public hospitals refused to perform legal abortions on girls and women who had been raped, even though Brazil allows abortions in cases of rape; among other investigations.

In 2013 and 2015, Agência Pública invited journalists to apply for a grant and pitch an idea for an investigative story. The agency then selected the projects with the help of donors. In 2015, more than 900 people donated about $22,000, which was 40 percent above the goal.

On its crowdfunding statement, Agência Pública describes the projects as a “partnership with our readers.”

“This project is a means to build a community that mobilizes and incentivizes us,” the crowdfunding statement says.

A new six-week campaign is underway through Oct. 27 and aims to fund eight new investigations in a slightly different format. Starting in November, Agência Pública’s own reporters will propose three topics each month and donors will vote on which story should be pursued. Polling will be done via email.

Topics that will likely come up, according to the crowdfunding campaign on Catarse.me, include accusations against the government, abuses of power and human rights violations.

“If the project began today, we could dedicate ourselves, for example, to mapping the most powerful fake news factories in the country; the advance of mining on indigenous lands; or cases of corruption in the judiciary,” the crowdfunding statement reads.

The goal this year is R$80,000 (about $25,000). More than 70 percent of the total will be spent on reporting costs, which include travel costs and salary. The remainder will go to taxes, Catarse fees and rewards for donors.

The crowdfunded investigative series is just one of the ways Agência Pública is bringing innovation to journalism in Brazil. The organization also hosts events, runs a fact-checking page, uses comics and short documentaries to tell stories and recently launched a smartphone app, powered by geolocation technology, that feeds historical content to people visiting Port of Rio de Janeiro.

 

Consider this scenario: You happen to be in Las Vegas this week for a previously scheduled vacation with some of your friends and you decide to go to the site of last week’s mass shooting, which left more than 50 people dead and hundreds injured during a music festival.

You visit the area mostly out of curiosity, but also to try to have a better understanding of how this deadly tragedy took place: How large was the concert area? How far was the Mandalay Bay hotel from which the shooter fired at concertgoers? Where was the stage placed? How many exits were there and where were they? Was there a triage area?

I can think of several other questions that would come up if I were visiting Vegas. But I can only think of one very efficient way that those questions could be answered: through augmented reality.

If a news organization were to build an augmented reality feature on their smartphone app with computer-generated images, texts, figures, shapes or all of those things combined, thus adding context to the actual objects and space that you see through your cellphone camera (in this case, the hotel and the stage, for example), you could get a much deeper understanding of what took place on the night of Oct. 1, 2017. Having a close and interactive look at a scene provides a much more engaging experience than a detailed article, video or even a diagram like this one:

Augmented reality, or AR, combines virtual reality with the real world — much like the hugely popular Pokemon Go mobile game. It’s not a brand new idea, but Apple’s investment in the technology, particularly with its new iPhone, will likely make AR applications much more popular in the coming months. Journalists should get on that train, as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Quartz are doing.

The Post announced last month the launch of its first embedded augmented reality story, which looks at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. one year after it opened. The story is accompanied with 3D visuals and audio narration.

Also in September, the WSJ launched a new AR feature embedded on their smartphone app that allows users to project a holographic 3D view of the U.S. stock market onto the real world. Users can place the hologram on their desk and follow stock market in real time with their camera.

Quartz is also adding AR to its mobile app. It recently included an AR feature on the Cassini spacecraft, which crashed last month. The story allows users to see the spacecraft through their iPhone camera as if it was physically in front of them. “You can walk around it, view it up close, and even experience its actual size — all providing a better sense of what Cassini looked like,” Quartz described on its website.

Other industries are not taking a wait-and-see approach and I don’t think journalists should, either. Ikea’s new app, for instance, lets shoppers see how furniture would look like in their actual homes. AR opens up new ways to illustrate stories. It provides engagement and brings the audience closer to a story, or a story closer to them.

What’s more, the ARKit, Apple’s AR development toolkit, is relative easy to learn. “It’s not quite drag-and-drop for producers, but it’s super close to that when it comes to the backend,” John Keefe, head of Quartz’s Bot Studio, told Nieman Lab.

In the short few weeks that I’ve been studying media innovation at the NYU Studio 20 graduate program, I’ve spent countless hours reading about the media’s past and recent innovation attempts. So much has happened and is currently underway that trying to put everything into context can be really overwhelming.

So before I move forward, let me pause and look at one segment of the American media whose innovation efforts are crucially important to understand: the newspaper industry — the most traditional in the journalism world and one that drives much of the national discussion.

What’s becoming increasingly clear, in my opinion, is that newspapers seem to finally accept that they must reinvent themselves and that there is no time to waste. Most of their reinvention efforts involve steering away from print while experimenting with different sources of revenue and trying to find their space in the ever-crowded digital world.

Newspaper publishers seem to — finally — understand that print should be one of their products, not the main product. Dean Banquet, executive editor of The New York Times, announced to his staff in a 2016 memo that a major change in the paper’s print structure was imminent.

“Assigning editors, in the very near future, will not worry about filling space,” he wrote. “They will worry over coverage, and the best ways to tell stories. The print hub, a dedicated group of designers and editors, will then construct the print paper out of the great wealth of journalism.”

Similar efforts have taken place at the Financial Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and many others. Another example is The Guardian, which has a digital-only U.S. newsroom.

But investing less time and money on the print publication is not enough. Sure, it also frees up staff, and maybe money, to produce more visual content like videos, interactive features, virtual reality and augmented reality (the Times and the Guardian, again, provide great examples). However, newspapers have also been forced to experiment with new revenue sources. Some popular ways to do so include paywalls, events, podcasts, newsletters and native advertising.

It seems that each organization ends up finding one strategy that works better for them. The Texas Tribune, for instance, made more than $1.1 million from events in 2013. The Arizona Republic runs the very successful Arizona Storytellers event, which has brought in revenue and helped the paper boost its ties with the community. As for podcasts: “The Daily” by the New York Times and “Dirty John,” a six-part series by the Los Angeles Times, are doing really well.

It’s early to tell whether the reinvention efforts above will translate into consistent profit, but there are promising signs. At the New York Times, for instance, print revenue continues to decline, but the company said in July that the second quarter this year was one of its strongest in digital revenue growth.

My biggest concern is with smaller, local newspapers. I wonder if they have the resources to reinvent themselves at a time of fast-changing technology and distrust in the media.

But what I find encouraging is the fact that many newspapers are creating teams or projects to help integrate newsroom tasks with the business side — an unspeakable taboo not long ago. Making sure that all departments are on the same page and focused on growing and/or cultivating an audience is extremely important.

McClatchy, for example, has a roving reinvention team tasked with promoting digital best practices across the company’s 31 newspapers. In one of the first newsrooms the team visited, reporters saw their page views rise by an average of 58 percent, according to a Poynter report. The Times has also invested in dedicated teams, including its Innovation Committee in 2014 and the ongoing Project 2020.

One newspaper that has the tools and money to innovate and try all these new things is The Washington Post. Since Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013, the Post has had more freedom to innovate. For instance, it has dozens of newsletters, it has a flash briefing on Amazon Alexa and it just launched an embedded augmented reality section on its smartphone app. Oh, and like many others, it’s a fan of native advertising:

If I were to assume, without any research, what group of people has the best online resources or methods to connect with each other, the tech community would be my first guess.

I believe that’s an intriguing question, but maybe you’re already thinking of numerous smartphone apps and tech news sites that do that job well – TechCrunch? Cnet? Mashable? AlleyWatch? GeekWire?

Well, do they? Do they really help connect technology professionals and enthusiasts? Do they provide engaging, clear and informative content? Do they offer enough resources on their web or mobile platforms to assist their audience further their knowledge and improve their skills?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I am determined to do some research and find out. If I find a gap or flaw worth exploring, the tech community might become the target of my first startup idea.

Although I don’t have a specific plan yet, since a great deal of research and planning will be needed, I do have a few vague ideas of what could work in a new tech news enterprise. I’ll list those ideas in a second, but first let me tell you why I am considering this community.

Over the past several weeks, I have learned in Studio 20 that a journalism organization should provide more than just content. It should offer resources and a platform for people with shared interests to connect with each other. The idea of merging news, resources and networking on one platform would, and already does, work in the tech community. Just visit TechCrunch, for instance, and you’ll see a variety of tech news stories (content), an events calendar (networking) and a jobs board (resource). There are many other tech websites with similar features, and that shows that the tech community is likely engaging and hungry for such services.

Another advantage of working with technology enthusiasts is the revenue potential. Forgive me for assuming, and I promise I will do some research on it, but I think those who visit tech news sites often read about new products, gadgets and services. And many of them probably consider spending money on the items they just read about. Now the possibilities open up: e-commerce, sponsored content, targeted advertising, commerce links and others. It may sound like a cheap idea, I know, but why should I launch my first startup in a field with little revenue potential?

Anyway, here are some things I think this new tech news enterprise would feature:

1. Mobile-first
   All content, resources, networking features and other components of this tech news startup would be created for mobile first. Then, all of it would be adapted to the desktop site. This would allow my team to experiment with virtual reality, augmented reality, 360° video and other emerging storytelling features.
2. Audio
   Every single article would come with a “Listen” option. That feature provides a convenient option for drivers or those who don’t feel like reading a somewhat long article to still take advantage of the app and be informed. Logistically, that means the startup would hire at least one person with a good, clear and engaging voice to read every article BEFORE it’s published.
3. NYC-focused
   The startup, at least in the beginning, would focus on the tech community in New York City. It would feature, for instance, new products or services being developed in the City or by New Yorkers. I believe this would help make the business plan more feasible and keep the community closer together.
4. Events
   This startup would not only help the community promote its own events in the New York City area, but it would host its own, such as meet-ups, expos, panel discussions, presentations and debates. Events help promote the company, bring in revenue and connect the community, but it would also help us collect data about our audience.
5. WeChat
   This also needs research, but I believe there are many people in New York and in the U.S. who use WeChat, China’s all-in-one social platform. Therefore, I would look into posting content on their app in addition to all the social platforms that are popular in the U.S.

Those are just vague ideas I’ve thought about over the past two days or so. None of them is revolutionary, but I think they could add value to a new platform that helps the tech community become even more informed, engaged and connected to each other.

One thing I didn’t mention, and perhaps the most important feature of any startup I may end up launching, is insightful and investigative journalism. I don’t know how low the bar is for these existing tech news sites, but I really didn’t find any examples of great writing on them. And whatever I end up producing has to include at least some investigative, old-fashioned journalism. There are many things happening and issues going on in the tech industry that are worth pursuing and I would love to see that happening – even if takes a membership-driven revenue model, but that’s probably a topic for another blog post.

Children and adults are told on a nearly daily basis that an appropriate diet must consist of high-quality foods. Not many of us actually succeed — or even listen to that advice — but I wonder what would happen if people were taught from a young age how to have a healthy and balanced news diet as well.

For this inaugural blog post, which is part of the Studio 20 graduate journalism program at New York University, I will look into how my own news diet has changed over the years. But I hope to discuss in a future blog post what impact news literacy courses would have on American society if taught in high schools.

I would say that my news diet during my teenage years was intense, but not very diverse. From the age of 10 or 11 until I was about 20 — right before I left Brazil and moved to the U.S. — I would read my hometown paper and Brazil’s biggest national paper roughly every day.

At times, my family would subscribe to those papers and other times my mom would bring them from work in the afternoon. I often spent two hours flipping through the pages of both papers and reading as much as possible. It was a hobby — or maybe an addiction?

I also enjoyed watching the nightly newscast on TV and the Sunday night news shows, but I wouldn’t do that as often as reading the paper.

After I moved to the U.S. almost 10 years ago, most of my news consumption quickly shifted to the web. I bookmarked websites like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the local newspaper and at least two Brazilian newspapers. I actually kept the habit of following the news from Brazil and still do it to this day, though not with the same frequency.

It was about five years ago that Twitter became my main news channel. I have increasingly used Twitter to consume information, and overall I like the experience. Sure, sometimes I feel like I’m creating a bubble with my favorite news outlets, but my news diet is definitely much more diverse since I am constantly discovering new journalism sources.

Over the past few years I also spent a lot of time watching cable news. I’m not very proud of that, since much of their air time consists of partisan pundits talking about the latest news in D.C. and not much about the rest of the country and the world. Anyway, I’m without cable since June and I feel just fine.

Nightly newscasts were never a big part of my news diet, but I always admired how some of them, especially on NBC and CBS, are able to summarize the most important news of the day in only half an hour.

Overall, I believe I can make my news diet way more “nutritious,” with more international journalism, perhaps, or just a wider variety of news topics. But I’m happy with the progress I made in finding more variety on Twitter in recent years and I’m fine with using Twitter or Tweetdeck as the main channel for me to find news stories.