I’ve moved smack in the middle of three small towns. Each of them publish their local news, which I read, voraciously. It’s just so interesting.
I’ve lived in the Denver area for close to twenty years. The local news there is desperately uninteresting. There is very little news to it. Spin, spin, spin…till you’re sick enough to vomit.
I have way too much Libra to be puking all the time. I began passing on the local news about five years ago. It just never told me anything useful.
Reading the news here, I am actually kept abreast of things. I know who died. I know where the party is, I know whose kid got a scholarship and most important of all, if a crime is committed, I know who did it, what they did, what they look like and how it’s being handled.
I’m not writing this to put down a city. I am from a city – Tucson Arizona. And reading the “paper” here, reminds me of reading the paper when I as a child and a teen and a young adult. Because I did read the paper. Are you kidding me? I read my local paper, religiously (sadge joke). If there was ever anyone, interested in what’s going on, it’s me. And that’s what the news used to deliver.
The news no longer serves this purpose. The news reports what the powers that be want you to think it is going on…it’s truly worthless. It’s worse than useless, because if you believe it, you’ll get nothing but stupider by the day! So it’s a great relief to be able to read these three papers…who report, independently. They don’t cut and paste content, see? It’s WONDERFUL. It sounds like this…
“A man on a bicycle, wearing these clothes, came into this store with this weapon and tried to get this money. The store owner reacted in this way, the robber to be took this action, various other specific things happened…and so on.”
Facts, see? Aren’t they glorious?
I’ve lived here for two months, but I’ve been reading the local news for four or five months. At this point, it’s pretty much all I care about. It reminds me of living in Tucson, before the internet. I didn’t hear about every small or large offense that might have occurred around the globe. Jeez, but life was great.
See the graphic? That’s a clip from the Tucson Citizen circa 1970. I remember Jerry’s Records. That was news right there, for sure!
I love this! I took journalism in college when you weren’t allowed to even use an adjective or an adverb. “Just the facts mame.” Those were reserved for sports- and that wasn’t journalism. (G) Those were the days…
Yeah, it’s an absolute joy to read true reporting. Seriously, it makes my heart sing. 🙂
This is why I have such a hard time with ‘national’ news. I am fully aware of the spin. And I reject it. The small area I live in has a lot of local reporting, but, and maybe this is careless of me, I just don’t care. I don’t care. What is the point? I don’t fit in. I don’t look to stand out, but I don’t look to integrate myself either. I have never been more painfully aware that I don’t belong here, but this is where I am.
Flux. Purgatory. I don’t know.
Journalism was my first major when I attended Texas State in 1992. The most interesting job I ever had was working as a reporter, typesetter, columnist and photographer for The Bridgeport Index in 1999. Bridgeport is my birthplace. My boss was an old school “just the facts, ma’am” editor and reporter. He indulged me in letting me write op-ed columns and a serial entitled All The World’s A Stage for a few months then told me to kill the characters off and conclude my little drama. “You wanna write soap operas, write novels and sell ’em at Wal-Mart” he said. Ha. He finally fired me. I’m much better at creative writing. I got to take pictures of the aftermath of a tornado once. That was fun. I got a great shot of a toilet in a tree. 🙂
Real life. Much of the ‘big news’ of that thing out there somewhere is manufactured by the big AP news services and reprinted or put on monitors for newscasters to read. It is not alive. It’s the media conglomerate. Unfortunately more of more of the newspapers in my area are now owned by Gannett and it is the same old rehash and not worth reading. I like running across the weeklies that come out of some of the small towns.
The one service that they could offer that would be useful and that they no longer provide is a central source for jobs in the area. I swear the disappearance of that is one of the reasons people have had a harder time finding jobs and employers have a harder time finding employees. Just my opinion.
On the way to the jobsite this morning, I happened to notice some businesses that have big banners on their building that say Now Hiring. Production workers, machinists, drivers, mechanics, and flooring workers wanted.
‘They’ do say that the net is causing people to stop being interested in the world and only interested in local goings on. I gather that your local rags aren’t owned by some big multinational. You are so very lucky to get that
That’s right. People are saturated…full up with ALERTS and news they can’t use.
Rumor has it, newspapers are dying anyway. Maybe Saturn in Sadge can stem the tide.
http://listverse.com/2011/07/03/top-10-reasons-the-newspaper-is-dying/
Basically, we as a culture have become so dumb, lazy and impatient that we really don’t give two shits about quality news–just spit out some half-true stories we can rant about on Facebook.
Print is dying. News on the internet is thriving. But its not real news, mostly editorial garbage or opinion pieces. And its all blog sites masking as real news.