Meet Nikki Lee. She studied engineering in college and human-computer interaction in grad school. She gets paid to product manage digital pen experiences for Windows and in her spare time she runs the Seattle Awesome Foundation and works on personal informatics research projects. She likes video games and riding bikes. She says that she is “profoundly introverted, but enjoy[s] public speaking and meeting new people.” And she gave away 12,000$ to charity and her friends picked the charities. Pretty awesome.
Nikki, who tweets @nkkl, was kind enough to answer some questions about her news consumption for my series “How Do You Get Your News?” If you’d like to participate, let me know.
1. How do you get your news? Please answer in a haiku or limerick. Your choice.
I really did try
Quartz and Circa and The Skimm
It’s still too much work
2. Please send me a gif or video that captures your attention span.
This is a pretty good average. The full range is about 1 second to 3-4 hours, so that tells you how many things land in the 1 second bucket…
3. How do you take your coffee?
I like my women like I like my coffee: not really my thing.
4. Who’s doing it right in news?
Maybe no one? Al Jazeera is good for when you want to actually know things and are a responsible adult. Twitter and Reddit (the user bases, not the companies) are really good at amplifying and spreading messages, so I usually hear about important events that way.
5. What’s the first news event that you remember?
Probably 9/11 – and I was a teenager at the time, so that mostly says something about my memory.
6. What was the best thing that happened to you this week?
I flew home for Thanksgiving and got to see my parents, brother, grandmother, and cat. Plus, my mom made me cookies!
7. Where do you live?
Seattle!
8. What do you absolutely hate about the news?
It’s too hard to figure out what’s actually important. Sensationalism and boring minutiae drown out meaningful stories, and when something big does come along, it’s often presented with so little context that I can’t figure out what’s happening or how it relates to anything else. Trying to follow actual news alternates between boring and baffling. News that’s digestible is generally just pop culture mental junk food or fear mongering – in other words, stuff that’s usually actively harmful.