I tried the same. 2 weeks after I started I attended a party where people mentioned that it was sad that Michael Jackson had died. I thought they were joking, but turned out they didn’t. It was in late June 2009. I started reading the news again.
But today I read them differently. I read news site, with some curation (e.g., settings for threshold for articles that comes up in various fields) together with a few favorite sites (e.g., HN)