Bojago Philip James's Blog

Keeping Current

People often ask me what newspapers I read. I haven't read or held a physical newspaper in a decade, and I get very little of my news from traditional news sources. However, I skim a lot of sources daily for information, be it general news, wine and spirits news, or technology-related information.

I follow 39 feeds, ranging from the NYTimes to Techcrunch to Tom Wark's Fermentation blog, and in total these sites generate around 200 articles per day. The only way I can keep up with this is to skim the headlines and just read the few that really catch my attention. I can do this in around 20 minutes using Google Reader which allows me to skim headlines chronologically.

Google also makes it easy to whittle down your list once it gets too large. They have a trends tab, which shows you which feeds you typically read. It's then easy to delete feeds that you may have added but no longer focus on. For example, from my account, Google tells me that “From your 39 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,517 items, starred 2 items, shared 0 items, and emailed 0 items.” However, some feeds are read frequently (NYTimes 83%) while others are ignored entirely.

In addition, I subscribe to several newsletters, including the following Wine Industry ones that I recommend:

>  Wine Business Daily - Essential daily industry news

>  Benson Marketing Groups daily newsletter - As above, essential daily reading

> Bottlenose newsletter - Bottlenose builds ecommerce websites for wineries, and they have a monthly newsletter which discusses aggregate metrics and data for their customers (eg. June's average order value for their stores was $255.09 a drop of 0.2% from the previous month).

> Mark Brown's Buffalo Trace Industry News Update - Mainly focused on Spirits, but a nice counterpoint to the California-centric wine news I often get.

I’ll talk about how I stay on top of whats’s being said and written about the companies I work with in a later post.