Information Overwhelm? How to Tailor Your ‘Media Diet’ to Stay Informed

As the founder of a legal PR and media strategy firm, I spend most of my time counseling lawyers on how to handle being the subject of media stories — how to answer reporters’ questions about high-profile clients and matters, how to ensure coverage of key issues is accurate, how to stay on the right side of professional guidelines around trial publicity — but, in the wake of tumultuous events shaping last year and this one, many lawyers tell me they are now struggling with the other side of the equation: their lives as media consumers. The need to keep up with business news across multiple industries and regulatory developments at the federal and local level, feels overwhelming, and they worry about what they are missing. 

They know they do not have the luxury of abandoning the effort to stay informed — there’s too much at stake for their clients and the business of their firms. Instead, they need to adopt a few new habits and systems to manage the content they consume. Here are some approaches that I’ve seen work well:

Limit social media consumption. LinkedIn and other social media channels can be a good way to stay informed, but the endless scrolling these platforms are designed to encourage bombards you with content and leaves you feeling overwhelmed and underinformed. Carefully edit the list of accounts you follow to make sure everything you see is credible and relevant. And get a handle on your overall social media use by using the “screentime” feature on your devices. You’ve got better things to do!

Assess your inbox. How many newsletters and alerts do you receive each week? Which ones really matter? Whittle that selection down to no more than three morning news summaries hitting your email each day:

• One for national headlines, such as the New York Times, Washington Post or Wall Street Journal
• One for local stories. In Chicago, where my firm and most of my clients are based, the Crain’s Morning 10 is an excellent curated list of headlines from multiple sources.
• One focused specifically on either legal news or the particular industry you serve. (ALM’s “The Morning Minute” and Bloomberg Law’s “Wake Up Call” are excellent examples of this. Law360 also has a feature that enables subscribers to create a custom newsletter for themselves pulling from their many different areas of coverage.)

Unsubscribe from all other alerts and newsletters. Your inbox will feel less cluttered, and you will have the bandwidth to actually engage with this selection of content.
Read and generate next steps. Merely skimming these emails every day, however, still won’t fully empower you to act on the intelligence they contain. You need to create space for the “so what?” analysis of that information, which might include questions like “What are the big takeaways and how do they square with what leaders already know about this issue?” or “Who needs to see this information, and how can I get it to them?” One way to “process” your content is to outsource the task to a clerk or trusted assistant who understands the questions that are top of mind for you and most relevant to the matters you handle. Indexing articles through the use of tags, one-sentence summaries, flagging for relevance by client, or whatever makes sense in your practice area helps ensure that you have the best, most current insights available when they are most important for your work. 

Think long term. Clients who trust your counsel rely on your ability to forecast the future we cannot yet see, and that stretches far beyond the breaking news landscape. As we saw numerous times last year, government entities and the industries they impact can make a dramatic move one day, only to reverse that decision 24 hours later. Leaders underestimate the whiplash that comes from consuming too much of this kind of media, getting stuck in reactive mode instead of staying focused on long-term goals. Make space to engage with longer, more substantive analysis from trusted sources offering not just news but valuable context, not just content but wisdom. 

Debra Pickett is the publisher of De Novo, a subscription-based publication for law firm leaders, and the founder of Page 2 Communications.