Is News Worthy?
May 15, 2006
I will readily admit that I am not a news watcher. By that I mean that I don’t have 5 different news sites in my RSS reader and I am not up on current national and world news. This isn’t to say that I havn’t tried. Recently I attempted to setup 5 different world news sources in my RSS reader, CNN, BBC, People’s Daily Online (China), Newsvine.com and Al Jazeera. I wanted to get information on events from around the world, information that was not “news worthy” in the US. Unfortunately I found mainly different views on the same events. Does this mean that other things are not happening in the world, or just that compared to Bush’s sliding approval and potential action with Iran, it just doesn’t matter.
So I gave up. My RSS reader is full of web things, things about new CSS techniques, the best way to use AJAX, how to improve the style of your blog. And so I write about those things to a declining audience, including myself. My blog becomes another voice of web technology that doesn’t say much, but maintains my interest for the 10 minutes I am writing in it. I would write about the news, but that is both depressing and of no interest to me. Why of no interest, because nothing will be done about it. At least when I write about web technology and no one is interested, it does serve the purpose of clearing my mind of the swirling thoughts of technology. If I wrote about the news, it would either frustrate me or rile me up, neither of which I could do anything about. All of this leads back to my original question, is news worthy?
Is news worthy of my attention? I don’t think so, at least not now. Until the news can look past “patisian politics”, “talking head syndrome” and “Election 20XX Coverage”, I dont think it is worth my time. This is not to say it isn’t important, it just isn’t important enough to warrant the total coverage that it gets in this country. I understand why it is done, the majority of the country wants it, ratings = money and without money you can’t broadcast the news. But in this information age we are supposedly entering, broadcasting the news is getting cheaper. This can lead down two very different roads. The first has anyone and everyone, including myself, writing about my problems and my opinions to where everyone’s voice is drowned out and no one pays attention. The second is where people put aside some of their personal feelings and write about “a bigger issue” with a objective opinion, providing evidence from both sides of the issue and offering the opportunity for discussion. The technology already allows for it, it is just the people involved that need to upgrade their thinking a bit.
I will readily admit that I am right now part of the problem. I don’t even know if I can convince myself to change and that the next blog entry won’t be about how I am working on a new version of this site or that I am coming along on my comics project. But maybe that just means that people don’t really need to read this site and that it is more of a personal sounding board than some wealth of content that I once pretended it to be. Or maybe it isn’t this blog that is important, maybe I am just ranting because I just don’t find news worthy right now and I want to feel that this is somehow part of the answer, an answer that is not easily found and may be years down the line.
1 Comment
Try fark.com lots of news from all over the world and all you have to do is read the headline to see if its worth your time.
Comment by Dan — 5/15/2006 @ 11:12 am