The last few weeks I am mainly posting on App.net and I am rarely using Twitter. I noticed today more than ever before that Twitter became in the last years my main news-source. Yesterday Dirk Bach, a famous German comedian, died and I didn’t knew it. Apparently it was all over the place in Germany: TV, radio, newspapers, twitter, you name it. Wouldn’t I have the subway today, which are equipped in Berlin with little TVs with news etc., I still wouldn’t know it.

And I have to say that I actually do not care that I do not get my news asap and all the time. I don’t miss it. I like it that App.net is right now a place to chat, which isn’t flooded by hype after hype. At the same time I do not feel that uninformed.

Once I heard from someone who is subscribed only to a weekly newspaper with the following reasoning: The hypes are already boiled down and only the important news that actually survived a week make it in there. I’m in a similar place. My main ways to get news right now are podcasts. My RSS-feeds deliver too much of an output that I could check them in a reasonable time when I’m really busy (like right now). It’s mainly for news about Japan that I check them because of a lack of a good podcast. If someone knows one in German, English or Japanese, please mention it in the comments.

For world news I listen to Newz of the World. It’s a weekly podcast in English about well Newz of the World from the point of view of the two podcasters Tim Pritlove and Bicycle Mark. They do in my opinion a good selection of news items - a good mixture of the important and the underreported news. For net politics related news I listen to the German podcast Logbuch: Netzpolitik. For economics I listen to Planet Money and Freakonomics. Not always actual topics, but a good selection, entertaining and they do a very good job on reporting. With those four podcasts I listen to all episodes. For anything else, usually Germany related, I listen to hr2 Der Tag and dradio-Hintergrund. They both select quite good actual topics and do good reporting on background information of those topics. I do not listen to each episodes of those two podcasts but select topics interesting to me.

Well, and that keeps me in my opinion actually informed without getting all the short-lived hypes and often quite unimportant news. Even the death of Dirk Bach is actually nothing I’m really caring about and not important enough that I would have needed to read a day long tweets and listen to stuff about him because I didn’t like what he did the last years. It’s sad that he passed away but is sad the same way like the passing away of other people I do not personally know. The important thing is that the significant news reach me.