The stuff I can’t go without reading every day.

The other day I did something long overdue — I pruned through my RSS feeds and hit “mark all as read.” To you this may not seem like a big deal but to me it felt so liberating — like the geek girl’s equivalent of burning her bra. For weeks I knew I was falling behind on reading all my RSS subscriptions; it got to the point that I was actually afraid of opening up my RSS reader of choice because I knew it would asplode.

Now I’m starting over at Square One with my RSS feeds, but it’s not like I haven’t kept up with things. I always keep up with my email, and there are some subscriptions (mainly newsletters) that I read every day. I post a lot of interesting things to my Facebook, and people I see often in real life tell me that they love the links I post and ask how I find them all.

So I’m going to share with you my daily reads — what pops into my inbox every day that I usually take time to at least skim over to see if there’s anything interesting and worth sharing. My life is about to get a helluva lot busier in coming weeks so I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up with them all, so if you’re that big of a fan of the information I share, here’s your chance to find most of my sources in one place.

In no particular order:

The New York Times - I’ve been getting their headlines in my inbox for years. In fact, for so long I can’t remember how long exactly. I’m a big fan of The Times.

Advertising Age - In particular, I get their headlines in AdAge MediaWorks, Creativity, Digital, and TalentWorks

Copyblogger – OK so it’s a blog & I subscribe to it via RSS, but it’s one that I absolutely don’t ever want to miss so I receive it via email as well. It’s all about copywriting, content marketing, social media, and full of awesome interesting tips and information. Oh, and it’s a lot of fun.

Lateral Action - also a blog and from the creator of Copyblogger, it’s just as fun and interesting. Per its about page, it “provides tips and techniques that help you focus on doing remarkable things, rather than getting trivial things done or never moving beyond ‘creative thinking.’”

Marketingprofs - I’m not an official paying member (yet) but I’m a big fan nonetheless. I highly recommend their Get to the Point! newsletters. I subscribe to a lot of them, maybe all, I don’t remember. They’re short, sweet little nuggets of marketing goodness that stay true to their name and well, get to the point. A couple of my favorites are Small Business, Marketing Inspiration, and Daily Fix, but I love them all.

Fast Company - words can’t express how much I love Fast Company. I receive their Best of Fast Company newsletter, as well as their Tech Weekly, Leadership Weekly,and their Ethonomics newsletters.

Social Media Today - it’s a weekly newsletter but I highly recommend visiting SocialMediaToday.com for a nice daily roundup of all the most interesting blog posts in the social media world. When I find myself neglecting my RSS feeds, this is where I go to get a nutshell overview of what’s being said in the sphere. If there’s something you’d like to see (or not see) on SMT, tell my friend Ari.

Ragan’s Daily Headlines - news, features, etc. for professional communicators worldwide. I don’t read this one as often as I read the others, but the themes are similar to the other stuff I read.

Help A Reporter Out [HARO] – a brilliant idea from Peter Shankman. The gist – it’s a 3x daily digest of queries from journalists from all over, looking for sources for all kinds of topics. It’s nice and organized into sections of topics/themes, and I don’t always have time to scroll through all of them but whenever I do, I usually find some reporter somewhere that’s looking for somebody I know, so I pass the info on to them to contact said reporter. For example, not long ago, a writer was looking for a feng shui expert for a story, and I whaddya know, I just happen to know a woman who is a feng shui expert, so I passed the reporter’s query on to her. This kind of thing gives you good karma and an insight into the trends that reporters are currently writing about. Also, it continues to remind me that I know some extremely interesting people.

So there you are. This is the stuff I at least skim every day, and where I find most of my news. Do you have any daily reads that you just can’t go without? I’m curious to know if other people are as spongy as I am when it comes to this stuff.

Bunny picture by tm_lv.