Farhad Manjoo ditched social media and subscribed to newspapers. This is what he found.

I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through. 

But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting. 

There was a lot I was glad to miss. For instance, I didn’t see the false claims —that the killer was a leftist, an anarchist, a member of ISIS and perhaps just one of multiple shooters. I missed too the Fox News report tying him to Syrian resistance groups even before his name had been released.

Instead, the day after the shooting, I spent 40 minutes poring over the horror of the shooting in three home-delivered newspapers. 

Not only did I spent less time with the story than if I had followed along as it unfolded online, I was better informed, too. Because I had avoided the innocent mistakes — and the more malicious misdirection — that had pervaded the first hours after the shooting, my first experience of the news was an accurate account of the actual events of the day. 

… my first experience of the news was an accurate account … I was better informed

This has been my life for nearly two months. In January, I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle. 

I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed. 

We have spent much of the past few years discovering that the digitization of news is ruining how we collectively process information. Technology allows us to burrow into echo chambers, exacerbating misinformation and polarization and softening up society for propaganda. We’re entering what some are calling an “information apocalypse.” And we’re all looking to the government and to Facebook for a fix. 

The experiment has taught me to avoid social media at all costs. After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn’t newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad. 

Just about every problem we battle in understanding the news today is exacerbated by plugging into the social-media herd. 

You don’t have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off.