How Farhad Manjoo writes his NYT tech column

Farhad Manjoo, tech columnist for The New York Times, sat down with Communications Network Board member and Knight Foundation vice president of communications Andrew Sherry to discuss the future of how we communicate, the disruptions to come, and whether or not robots will take your job.

Here is an excerpt:

Tell us, basically, how you work. What tools do you use to make yourself more effective, more productive … how you both are consuming information and how you are creating information?

My basic task every week is to write one column. The way that that works is I read everything that’s going on in the tech industry. I use a lot of tools. I use the common ones. I visit a lot of websites. I use some aggregators that follow tech news, like this site called Techmeme, which boils down everything that’s going on in the tech industry to a few headlines. The most important way that I come upon news stories these days is Twitter. I’m just constantly following Twitter, finding news and reading it and linking it out and sharing. It’s like the Newswire in a way. Like people in finance, I think, look at Bloomberg and I look at Twitter.

Being on Twitter, it’s not procrastinating?

I wonder about that. It’s both, and it certainly occupies a lot of my time. Hours and hours. The amount of time I spend on Twitter way dwarfs the amount of time I spend writing a column. I have come upon news stories … important column ideas from Twitter — like connections on Twitter — and probably one of the reasons that I’ve gotten my last several jobs is because of a networking effect that has created. I would say it’s been hugely important to what I do on a day-to-day basis and my career at large. It’s also often a waste of time.

Read more here.