Hello to my readers. I have to apologize for taking such a long break from writing my blogs. I have had LOTS of interesting ideas that I would like to write about – but don’t seem to be able to get a big enough hole in my schedule to do so. Mostly I am just lazy. I only seem to have the necessary mental energy for a short period of time in the morning, there are available times in the evening, but I just don’t have the “steam” to do so when the time is available. I hope to be more consistent – but who knows?

I recently moved to a “new” (old) house in Sonoma. Fixing the old house up has been a lot of my time problem. That activity seems to be slowing down a bit so I decided to subscribe to the local newspaper in the hopes of getting my head out of the sand, and perhaps return to writing. I stopped subscribing to a newspaper more than twenty years ago because they stopped delivering it to my home, and at the same time the paper dwindled to just a few pages that weren’t worth the option to also pay for delivery by mail. I like the paper delivered at morning coffee time, not mid-day mail times. I suppose I could have subscribed to a major newspaper with on-line delivery, but just gave up.

Now I find the newspaper waiting for me on my driveway when I get ready for a cup of coffee in the morning. It is a small local newspaper, but has the important sections that I remember with fondness. It even has the funnies section the advice columns! There is a smattering of local news about the usual things such as automobile accidents, local art events, news about the doings of the local schools and politicians, etc. It also has a significant amount of national and international news, plus pointed and interesting commentary on a wide variety of topics. In short, it is a “real” newspaper like that I grew up with seventy years ago. Actually, since my new home is in my old home town, it IS the same newspaper that I grew up with.

I have noticed that there is something very different about a newspaper than the network shows such as CNN, CBS or any others. The differences are mainly two-fold.

The first big difference is about the quantity of items in the newspaper versus whatever you can get with a news program on TV. A quick check of today’s paper identified 40 long (1/2 a page) articles, 25 short local spots, a bunch of sports things, and a lot of general interest material about cooking and gardening. I haven’t counted the number of topics in a typical hour/day of TV news but I am sure it is much smaller for each station (and I can only look at one station at a time). For example, an hour of CNN coverage might include four items – with little actual information but a LOT of commentary. The local San Francisco stations have a little more breadth, but almost no depth.

The second big difference concerns how I approach the news. TV provides a stream of information, separated by hours of advertising spots. I have no choice about what to see, how much I see or in what order. However, with a newspaper it is a completely different experience. I get to skim through the pages looking at headlines and photographs – quickly picking up a background of what is going on in just a few minutes. If something catches my eye I can slowdown and get much more detail, until I get bored and go to the next item. I can always come back for those items that I skipped over. My approach is to read the ones that interest me the most at first, then come back as time allows. I can adjust my exposure depending upon my mood and the available time. I can do that with broadcast news.

I find the experience of reading the news to be much more fulfilling than watching it being shoved to me. I get to go at my pace, get to go as deep as I want, and I get exposed to a MUCH wider body of knowledge. I suppose an on-line subscription to a news paper might meet some of my needs, but it is also a very different experience – one that depends too much on indexes and links. I find myself jumping to the links and missing most of the headlines, photos and short descriptions. It is all there, but I don’t see it with the on-line experience.

I wonder how important this shift in how news is presented is to the overall education of Society. It seems like there is an astounding amount of just plain “ignorance” today. A lot of people just don’t seem to know much about anything. I suspect that is made much worse by the very limited “echo chambers” of “news” presented on TV. There is almost no information provided, and that which is provided is very shallow and biased. There just isn’t the time or the attention for actually getting into a story. I think part of the problem is that a very large percentage of the public are functionally illiterate – they have not learned to read and comprehend written material. If they don’t hear it they can’t get to it. Any presenting material verbally is so slow that it cannot be in much depth.

If it is true that there is something fundamentally better about how news and information is presented in newspapers, what can be done about it? How can we keep newspapers from disappearing? Should we do that, or are they just redundant with our other sources of information such as TV news, books and magazines? I am not sure, but I think we lost something when papers became almost extinct. There are still papers, such as USA Today or the Wall Street Journal, that provide some of the benefits of a news paper – but without the local flavor/color that makes home town papers so interesting (and where are the comics?).

I don’t suppose there is anything to do about this – I just thought it is interesting how differently I interact with the news when it is in a big page on my lap as opposed to a stream of words selected by a producer someplace a long way from me.