On October 8th, Kelsey Russell, a news literacy influencer, spoke with Professor David Alm at Hunter College, where she shared how she began engaging with the news and how she developed a deep relationship with print media.
Russell’s love of print began when she was growing up in Atlanta. Her dad was an avid New York Times reader and she used to watch him read the newspaper every day.
That ritual stayed with her, even if she didn’t realize it until years later.
After graduating from Boston University, where she studied sociology, Russell moved to New York City for a master’s program at Teachers College, Columbia University. In her second year in Columbia, she experienced extreme anxiety.
She began to feel like everyone around her knew what was happening in the world, while she was getting all her news from social media. “I was just having a lot of self-doubt, self-worth issues,” she told Prof. Alm. “At the same time, I felt like I didn’t know anything.”
She asked for a print subscription to The New York Times as a birthday gift, and soon after, made a video about finding print much more fulfilling than social media. She has since amassed more than 100,000 views on TikTok, where she reads news stories and analyzes them in real time.
In an interview with me before the event, Russell reflected on how consuming social media conjures a range of emotions. “It makes us super desensitized to what’s going on,” she said. Paradoxically, “it also makes us hypersensitive,” she added, “because if you see a post about genocide right after a post of you being left out of the party, that’s going to incite so many different emotions.”
Consuming print media also changed how she relates to her friends, whom she now asks for their home addresses so she can mail them newspaper clippings. “Maybe it’s the relief of being able to physically hold something, taking my time to do something,” she said. “That is, for me, when I want to do it, versus feeling like it’s forced upon me in an algorithm.”
In Russell’s view, the decline of local journalism is the source of many issues in America, and how legacy institutions, such as The New York Times, have changed significantly in deciding whom to cover.
It is this disconnect, she explained, that calls for more people to support local, independent journalism, because the major legacy news companies often do not include the voices that need to be heard.
“That feeling, when you see yourself, is what news should feel like,” she said. “The feeling of not existing, or being taken away, is fearful.”
