I used to be an over-subscriber to magazines. So if I want to know what Steven Cook thinks about what's happening in Egypt, I could go find his latest article in The Atlantic or Time or whatever, or I could just go to CFR and there it is. I'm constantly looking at the CFR because it's not just original pieces by council fellows-it's also an aggregate of their articles. And then I just have constant access to the Council on Foreign Relations website. Foreign Affairs-less on a daily basis, but certainly it's important to keep track of the articles coming out. I scour the top five articles on Foreign Policy every single day. It's almost like the first draft to the piece The New York Times is going to run tomorrow. It's great to be able to read his firsthand account. By the time I catch up with what's going on, the media requests for me to comment on it have begun. For instance, today the media requests started to come in about an hour ago : "Can you talk about Egypt? Can you talk about the new Iranian president's foreign minister?"įor Iran, Thomas Erdbrink of The New York Times is fantastic. The next three or four hours is getting ahead of the news and trying to comment on it. Now I can start commenting, now I can start talking about what's ahead. Then, usually by around 10 Pacific Time, I'm ahead of the game. Until about 10:00 my time, it's just catch-up. My mornings are spent simultaneously waking up, feeding and dressing my kids, and sort of catching up on what happened while the East Coast was awake and the West Coast was asleep. Nevertheless, by the time I pick up my computer or my phone, it's already 10:00 in the morning on the East Coast. I wake up pretty early because I have young kids. My particular problem is that I mostly live on the West Coast. That was kind of the moment it all just became reality for me. What you're calling breaking news is just simply what I saw on my Facebook page an hour ago. I mean it was just the Facebook feed! It was a camera pointed at the Facebook feed. I don't mean someone was reporting on the Facebook feed. And it was remarkable: rather than reports about the situation-from Tehran or from a neighboring country-on the CNN TV screen was the same Facebook feed that I had on my computer two hours ago. At one point CNN, in a breaking news segment, begins to talk about what's happening on the ground in Iran. The entire time in the background is CNN and the 24-hour cable news networks. And I remember this moment because it was so instrumental for me. We were doing this for days on end with barely any sleep. My partners and I were staying up all day and night on Facebook, on Twitter, coordinating with people on the ground in Tehran and other parts of the city-feeding news stories to traditional outlets, trying to verify reports as they were coming in. When this really came home for me was during the 2009 Green Revolution. Twitter is not a communication tool-it's my primary source of information about what's going on in the world. It's funny, because I found myself in the strange position where rather than actually reading the articles that my favorite journalists write in the newspaper, I just follow their Twitter feeds and find out what's going on before they have a chance to write it and before it comes out in the newspaper. The first thing I read in the morning is my Twitter feed. This is drawn from a phone conversation with Reza Aslan, the Iranian-American religion scholar, writer, and author of Zealot, who spoke to us last month about the aftermath of his viral interview with Fox News. How do people deal with the torrent of information pouring down on us all? What sources can't they live without? We regularly reach out to prominent figures in media, entertainment, politics, the arts, and the literary world to hear their answers. This article is from the archive of our partner.
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