Once I was a news producer. Now I am a news consumer. It’s been a tough transition. Being a reporter is a cross between of being in the Mafia and being a human racehorse: once a member of the Media Tribe, it’s hard to disaffiliate—and once the speed and thrill of news gathering is in your DNA, the advent of any major news event jangles your neurons like the clang of a racetrack starting bell. It’s been 14 years since I got a paycheck from a daily news organization, and I don’t expect either of these conditions ever to totally disappear, but it’s still long past time for me to put aside my “journalist” identity and call myself what I am.

And who is that? I’m the person you should be writing/filming/editing for. I say this because I am educated, intelligent, middle class but a long ways off from affluent and, on most subjects, dumb as a box of rocks. It is your job to tell me what’s going on, and to do this in a timely, accurate and accessible manner. It used to be that this was pretty much the whole deal: news producers (reporters, content providers, whatever you want to call them) had the truly awesome responsibility of deciding what was news, and putting it through the meat grinder we call daily journalism. But now that the media universe has shattered into a million tiny pieces and we’re on a 24-hour news cycle, much of that responsibility has shifted onto me, the consumer—and overall, the total weight of responsibility on both sides has gone way up. Today, journalists still have the awesome responsibility of deciding what constitutes news and conveying that information in a timely, accurate and accessible way—but on top of that, journalists now have the additional problem of marshalling the resources they must have (namely, time and money) in order to do the job right. (That‘s the subject for a future column.) For our part, consumers can no longer skate by with being passive receptacles for information poured into our brains by major media outlets. In a way we’ve never had to do before, we are responsible for our own media diets—and responsible for what happens when we neglect them.

If you notice a lot of food metaphors here, it’s because what I’m talking about is a lot like the FDA food pyramid, which has been redesigned from the days when it was a succession of horizontal layers. The new version is tougher than the old; in the old version, “fats and sweets” were a small but distinct category at the top. The new one is a series of vertical stripes, and you have to read the fine print pretty closely before you even come across a mention of fats and sweets; they’re now contained in the slender purple stripe that goes up the far right side that’s labeled “discretionary calories”—a category which now includes non-candy items like sausage and those hyper-sweetened cereals which we were all once told were “part of a balanced diet.” It seems the old pyramid let some of us get away with way too much. In like fashion, if you indulge recklessly in the current media climate, your brain will turn into mush.

The most plentiful item on the media menu these days is celebrity gossip and fashion magazines. I view these as my discretionary calories, and I read them when I get my hair done, which is roughly every two months. I could be a snob here and say I’m not interested in them, but in fact I am totally transfixed by whether Taylor Swift stole somebody’s boyfriend and what George Clooney is up to and if Miley Cyrus and Justin Beiber had dinner this week. But this is mind candy, and you have to limit your intake. I don’t buy People or U, I don’t watch TMZ or visit such websites, and I don’t let my kids bring any of this crap into the house.

Grains: for me, that’s local news, and it comes from everywhere—e-mail list-serves, the Metro section of the Washington Post (my local paper), the local city newsletter, one of the freebie papers which keeps showing up in my driveway. This news is often pretty boring, but it’s still essential to know what the school board has planned for re-drawing attendance boundaries, how much the new city hall is going to cost, which houses have been broken into in my general vicinity, and hey!—the state of Maryland will give you a coupon for $25 off for people who want to buy a tree and plant it. Talk about news you can use!

Meat and beans: These are the truly essential news stories, the stuff you read just to be functionally literate in terms of what’s happening. Your definition of this will of course depend on you. When I want to know details of how the new health care bill will affect coverage for mental health care, a topic of great personal concern for me, I read coverage by Robert Pear in the New York Times. Pear is one of the very few reporters in the news business these days who has the time, the institutional backing and the expertise to cover this extremely complicated subject. In the past, there might have been four or five such people, but the ranks, as we know, have been thinned. In the past, too, I would have subscribed to the print edition of The New York Times, but getting that every day in addition to the Post was a waste of money, since we never had time to read it. This means that most of the time, I read Robert Pear online. (How long can I keep getting this kind of expertise for free? A subject for still another column.)

But Robert Pear, as good as he is, is just one person, and it’s impossible for him to do everything. This means I need to search out other sources for what I want to know, in much the same way that anybody who feeds a family learns what various grocers do best. The Washington Post, for instance, is superlative on coverage of the political ins and outs of the health care bill, but if you’re interested in any analysis of the actual content of the bill, it ranks as barely mediocre. A recent interactive the Post had up on its website under a headline promising news about the exact ways in which the health care bill would affect me, the individual reader, sucked me in—and from it I “discovered” that if I get my insurance via a private employer or the federal government, not that much would change. I felt like I’d just lost my quarter in a bubble gum machine. The major television networks aren’t of much use when it comes to in-depth coverage on technical issues—and when I watch them, I sometimes feel like I should be sitting in a retirement home with soup dribbling off my chin, so skewed are the topics (and the commercials) for the over-65 set. Nowadays, the folks we once hung on for every word of the Apollo 11 moon landing and those unforgettable images of 9/11 are sort of a national version of the local television news: good for heart-tugging human interest pieces, tornadoes, floods and plane crashes.

Sometimes I find myself having to depend on resources that in the past I wouldn’t have considered “news” outlets, like think tank publications. I’ve also learned to use Google Alert as a way of tracking a given topic across a whole spectrum of media outlets. But Google, as its name suggests, is a giant, indiscriminate sucking machine. Using it is like cleaning out mom’s house after she’s moved into assisted living: to discover the gems, you have to sort through a ton of junk.

The “vegetable” part of a news media diet includes the stuff you’d just rather not eat, but you eat it because you know it’s good for you. For me (and I’m not proud to admit this) most foreign news falls into this category, unless it happens to come from a place I’ve been. I realize this makes my outlook pretty provincial, and one of these days maybe I will get around to doing something about that. “Vegetables” also includes news from outlets I despise and do not trust. Fox News is number one of this list for me, but I watch it from time to time, because I want to know what a lot of other people think is going on. Keeping an eye on the prism through which other people view reality is a way to keep my own reality from becoming distorted. For my ideological opposites, the same kind of thing might involve listening to Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” (another great show I don’t have time for). Whatever it is, expose yourself to a viewpoint not your own.

Fruit: This is the fun stuff that’s also good for you, which gives you some insight or teach you something you didn’t know before. A long and thoughtful profile on some artist whose work I admire falls into this category. Another good example is a two-part article which ran in The New Yorker last August by Ian Frazier, who traveled by car across Siberia—a journey which encompassed eight time zones and one-twelfth of the world’s land mass. Strictly speaking, there’s nothing I need to know about Siberia, but this was just riveting—and it did something to alleviate that provinciality problem I just mentioned. Documentaries fall into this category, as do travel pieces and good science writing.

Dairy: This is where editorial columns come in. And here, honestly, I don’t mix it up; I already know what Charles Krauthammer thinks about most things, and there’s something about his world view that makes me feel as if he has put a vise around my head and is trying to pop it like a pimple. Not all unpleasant things are good for you; some are just unpleasant. Staff editorials, however, can provide a kind of behind-the-scenes take on the news that’s helpful. E. J. Dionne’s viewpoint is cheerful, intelligent and analytical, and he’s a walking encyclopedia of political knowledge. I do try to keep something of an open mind here, by taking a look at any op-ed piece by a person with expertise in a subject I’m interested in, even if that person is of a political persuasion I don’t subscribe to. I admit I’m highly selective here. But it’s okay to have opinions about opinions.

Oil: This is a category I reserve for all first-person pieces. The best ones give you a special insight you can’t get any other way. But just as the fast food world is swimming in grease these days, first-person pieces are as easy to find as a bag of potato chips, and just as nourishing. I try to keep an eye out for the good stuff. As for the rest…well, I understand why editors commission them. They’re cheap, and they help fill the gaping maw. I do sometimes think, though, that if I see one more piece about somebody’s deadbeat dad, or somebody’s third grade teacher, or somebody’s decision to move to another apartment….well, let’s just not go there.

Anyway, that’s my media diet. On any given day, I’m doing extremely well to hit half of it. I am, after all, only human, and some nights all I want to do is watch “Dancing With the Stars.” But overall, I am increasingly conscious of what media I’m consuming, where it comes from and who produced it. Back in the Huntley-Brinkley era, nobody had to think about this. Today, anybody who doesn’t is in danger of becoming the mental equivalent of a person who dines at McDonald’s three times a day. I am having to work a lot harder to get reliable information; in a sense, getting the news has become a form of gathering the news. I no longer expect a single news outlet to tell me everything I need to know; on the other hand, when I find a source I trust, my expectations may be higher than ever. It’s something to think about, isn’t it? All those millions and millions of eyes and ears out there, belonging to people who are growing more media-savvy by the day.

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