In February 2012, I spent a week logging every piece of news I consumed for a class at LSU. I still have the spreadsheet. February 6: 30 minutes with The Advocate, 15 minutes on CNN's Twitter account, 30 minutes of The Colbert Report. Best day, 2:15. Worst, 55 minutes. A later section required me to build a "healthy news diet," so I traded my iPod for NPR on the drive to work and put the AP app on my iPhone. My assessment of public radio, preserved for posterity: "Listening to NPR was an arduous task." I was 21.

What I notice now is the premise. The assignment assumed I was choosing. Every line in that log was a decision I had made and could defend, or regret, including the Twitter entries, because in early 2012 that timeline was still reverse chronological. It was a list of accounts I had picked, in the order they posted.

Today, I’d imagine that media journal would require another column: Why did I see this? Did I seek out the story, or did a platform select it for me? Did I follow the person who posted it, or merely pause on something similar? Did it appear because it was important, popular, or profitable?

Which is why I keep thinking about how often information literacy gets redefined:

I asked colleagues and a group of our fellows what they remembered learning in school about evaluating information. Their answers offered a surprisingly tidy history of the internet. Older respondents remembered encyclopedias, footnotes, libraries, the Dewey Decimal System and Encarta on CD-ROM. Later graduates remembered databases, website domains and stern warnings that Wikipedia did not belong in a bibliography. The youngest respondents were more likely to recall lessons about fake news, digital footprints and online safety. Most had been taught how to judge information once it was in front of them. Far fewer remembered anyone explaining the system that put it there.

A study of 12-to-16-year-old Australians published last fall in the Journal of Youth Studies found that 67% get news from social media or YouTube often or sometimes, while only 40% had ever heard the word "algorithm" used in connection with news. Most of it finds them sideways, while they're on the platforms for other reasons. Which is also how a raccoon named Jimothy turns up in your feed on a Tuesday.

The systems doing the sorting are getting harder to describe even for the people who build them. In March, LinkedIn's engineering team published an unusually detailed account of its rebuilt feed: five separate retrieval pipelines, one of them a chronological view of your network's activity, replaced by a single system that reads what a post is about and matches it to what it models as your professional interests. Same profile, same network, different feed. 

My 2012 paper actually predicted the demand, arguing that people "want a custom news interface" that newspapers can't provide. What I didn't anticipate is that you wouldn't have to ask.

Which brings me to a fact I find both charming and slightly unbelievable: you can still buy a brand-new print encyclopedia. World Book's 2026 edition runs 22 volumes and $1,349, with the American flag across the spines for the country's 250th. An encyclopedia was never neutral. Editors decided what earned an entry, how much space it got, whose version of history became authoritative. But those choices were finite, visible, and identical for every reader who opened the same edition. The algorithm behind a feed makes the same kind of calls one reader at a time, continuously, and mostly out of sight.

My college assignment was meant to make me a more intentional consumer of news. I concluded, with the confidence of a 21-year-old: “Individuals tend to get their information in the easiest way possible.”

I was right about that part. The harder assignment now may be helping students understand what “easy” has come to mean. It’s not merely choosing among sources, but recognizing the systems choosing among sources for them. 

For years we asked students: can you find it? Then: can you trust it? The next question may be why they saw it at all.

What did we miss? And what's the earliest lesson you remember about evaluating information? Hit reply; I read every one.

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