People Not In The News Commenting on the News: Meet Kylee Wall

Meet Kylee Wall. She’s a full-time film and TV editor and a part-time portrait photographer. She has a cat named Pixel and loves to travel. “My favorite trip so far was LA (for an American Cinema Editors event), followed closely by being stranded in New York during a blizzard (for an American Film Institute directing workshop for women),” she says. “I’m a huge advocate for services like Airbnb and RelayRides, for feminism and equality, and for more television shows like X-Files and Twin Peaks.”

Kylee, who tweets @kyl33t, was kind enough to answer some questions about how she gets her news. If you’d like to read the others in the series, please click here, and if you want to take part, just let me know.

1. How do you get your news?

Primarily through social media, which is something I realized would be a regular thing in 2009 when I found out about and followed the Ft. Collins balloon boy hoax entirely through Twitter. Breaking news hits my Twitter feed the fastest, but Tumblr has also become a good discovery tool for “smaller” stories. Besides that, NPR radio (mostly Morning Edition and All Things Considered) and Al Jazeera’s posts on Facebook.

A few months ago I decided to add CNN and USA Today push notifications to my phone to see if there was news I was missing. The result of that experiment is a whole lot more noise with little gain, with regular updates on the stock market and sporting events or celebrity gossip — my own feeds are much more tailored to things I care about.

2. Please send me a gif or video or poem that captures your attention span.

3. How do you take your coffee?

Black. Matches my attire.

4. Who’s doing it right in news?

Comedians. Colbert, Stewart and Oliver. They put together graceful, insightful commentary pieces that are well-researched and often self-deprecating, and I feel like I learn deeper facts about an issue through ten minutes with them than ten minutes of talking heads on CNN.

5. What’s the first news event that you remember?

The OJ Simpson verdict. This is also the first news event I remember discussing. I was in third grade and we had heated debates on the school bus. (First television event discussion was also on the bus: the reveal of the white Power Ranger.)

6. What was the best thing that happened to you this week?

I learned that my gender equality activism within the industry I work in is being given a major conference platform in the coming months, which is pretty awesome.

1. Where do you live? Region is fine. City is better, but optional.

I’m currently in Atlanta. I was born and raised in central Indiana.

7. What do you absolutely hate about the news?

The 24 hour cable news cycle. When a major event happens, I used to go to CNN for fast and curated updates about what’s happening. But every time I do that, I’m saturated with speculation, repetitious segments, or irresponsible reporting. Then I have to withdraw from current events for a period of time because I can’t take it anymore. There has to be a better way than making a horrifying incident into a sporting event.

11. What’s the best podcast to listen to while doing chores?

I don’t listen to podcasts while I do chores because I tend to stop when something is really blowing my mind. I once fell off the treadmill at a gym while listening to the “Colors” episode of Radiolab. When I’m not a danger to myself, Radiolab and Serial are two of my favorites.

12. How do you get your news when you travel?

The nice thing about social media is that it doesn’t care when you travel. It’s still entirely possible to keep up with everything just the same. I have my Twitter follows sorted into lists with people who have a higher concentration of good links or current events tweets on one of them, so I can quickly switch to a focused list when I’m looking to be more specific.