My girlie and I have a ritual not unlike many painfully sophisticated couples across the US and the world: on Sunday mornings we read the paper together while drinking coffee. It’s simple and glorious and definitely tops the list of routines and behavioral patterns that fill our week. This morning however, I tried something different. While she read the New York Times, I browsed my Twitter stream on my iPhone and linked to articles of interest posted by the smart folks I follow. Turns out, the news I read this morning was a lot more engaging than the stuff I find in the main stream media. For some reason, this method works better for me than other online solutions to gather preferred information, such as aggregating news via an RSS reader. The short posts are easier to scan, the personalities that post them have inherent meaning for me (each of my Tweeps has their own personal brand and their content is an outward expression of that) and I find that I’m regularly more surprised and delighted getting news this way than by other means. Among the various and sundry tidbits of info served up by my Twitter community, was the “secret” and controversial social media guidelines recently imposed by the Washington Post on their employees, which touches on the interesting issue of how to separate your professional persona online from your personal one, or if that’s even possible at all.

So does this mean print media is dead to me? Nah, there’s something really great about reading the paper-paper on Sundays, but I’ll probably continue to do a quick pass through my Twitter stream too - especially since I just don’t get enough time during the week to immerse myself in the vast amounts of interesting info being churned out by my social networks.