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I always thought of the newspaper as the average person's college -- a place where, if you spent the time, you could learn something about anything you really wanted to know about and at very little cost.
Best of all a good deal of the joy came from the way a newspaper could unexpected introduce me to new and fascinating information that I had no idea I wanted to know about.
Though I still read print newspapers on the weekdays, it's mainly because they come to my office that way. At home, my Sunday morning routine now begins with me settling into my easy chair with my cup of coffee and Google news on my laptop.
And, you know what? It's better. The variety of news and information is so vast. I started really understanding this during the Obama campaign, when I, like everyone else, was searching everyday (multiple times) online for some new scrap of information that would show we were winning.
That activity opened me up to numerous new information sources and the wide variety of content available online -- much more than a newspaper could ever provide and much more varied.
Yes, you can't spread the online world out on the table, but, if you have a laptop -- and that's essential -- you can enjoy it from an easy chair.
I'm not a tech geek, but my next post will tell you what I think are the basics for shifting over to an online news world. It's really not that hard.
Posts
This is a great answer to Kristoff's whiny column on Thursday (NYT). Our world has a lot more significant questions than one newsprint compendium can address, and we are all (especially after the election) struggling to "make sense" - using whatever resources are available
ReplyDeleteI think Kristof's column had some good points, but didn't address the sharing aspect of consuming news online. Back when news content in a community was driven by one voice, like daily paper, if you wanted to challenge or chew on it, you had to do it with your family or your buddies (who often had a similar perspective).
ReplyDeleteOn the internet, serious people must back up everything they say - linking to evidence and knowing someone will respond publicly with different and sometimes better ideas or thinking. Locally, I find a news story or issue even more valuable and interesting after Steve Rhodes (beachwoodreporter.com) or Whet Moser (chicagoreader.com's Chicagoland blog) chewing on it and challenging what I originally thought. Folks like Matthew Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, Ezra Klien, and Daniel Larison do a really great job of this nationally.
All these folks have different experiences and expertise - ideas get a much a more rigorous public debate among the policy wonk/media geek/internet nerd class, which includes many of the folks I (and Valerie and many folks in our field) know.
Now, among regular folks, I think Kristof is right - the internet does help people sit in silos. But I think that's getting better. Millenials and following generations will live, study, work, worship, and play many more places than previous generations and share, challenge, and debate what they read every day with everyone they know on Facebook and Twitter (or whatever computer stuff the kids will be using in the future).
Just gotta figure out how to pay journalists to go out and gather the news so we all have something on which to chew...
Valerie.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great piece. Thanks for posting it! You should check out a kindle...I don't have one yet, but everyone who has them is raving about reading books and newspapers on the device.
Mark Russo