The other night, I watched coverage of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, held in Washington, DC. And as soon as I saw this moment of humo(u)r, I knew it needed to be shared:
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
I've been a news junkie for pretty much my entire life. My mother has told me of seeing the logo of the Progressive Conservative Party in the Ottawa Citizen (which was the newspaper my parents subscribed to) and saying "Joe Clark. Government." Given the short time he was prime minister, I would have been three years old at the time.
My first political memory would be watching the coverage of the 1984 Canadian election. Elections were fun, because they had so many numbers! But I would go on from there to actually pay attention to the news and to the House of Commons.
But news has always been something that's been important to me. But I've been noticing that newspapers aren't as important to me as they used to be.
When I was younger, newspapers were "the world". Maybe more accurately, they were the world in my living room. For TV news, there was CNN or there was the evening news. I remember watching excitedly for the launch of CBC Newsworld in 1999. But with TV news, you only saw what the producers thought was most important at the time. And if you wanted to get more detail on a story, the best way was usually to wait for the next morning's newspaper.
But the Internet has changed things. I go to TV news often. It's a great way to find out what's going on in the world right now. And "right now" holds its own attraction to me. But I know not to count on them for the detail I want on the news that most interests me. For that, I turn to the Internet.
RSS feeds have been great for that. I subscribe to a number of CBC news feeds and receive email alerts and newsletters from CNN, the New York Times, and Washington Post. In the past few months, I've added blogs into that mix as I've found ones whose interests match my own. (I am envious of Kady O'Malley's opportunity to be paid for live-blogging parliamentary committee meetings...at least, I assume that Maclean's magazine pays her for her Inside the Queensway blog.)
The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz has an interesting reflection on newspapers the other morning, in the wake of a round of buyouts at that newspaper. His bedrock: newspapers are too important to lose:
I know, I know. The future is digital. The Web is a cornucopia of fast-moving video and blogs and bulletins and gossip, while newspapers are old, slow and less than hip. That's why The Post (and every other paper on the planet) is beefing up its online presence and why I write a daily blog for the Web site.
But -- and stop me if you've heard this one -- newspapers matter. There isn't a Web site around that can produce the probing work, such as the exposé of shoddy conditions at the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center, that won The Post six Pulitzer Prizes this year. The economics of the Web, for now, won't support a staff that can hold public officials accountable across the region and still cover every Nationals game. So I cling to an old-fashioned, almost mystical belief in the power of ink on paper.
For myself, I think Kurtz has inadvertently put his finger on one of the problems with newspapers. They attempt to be all things to all people. They probably have to be to be able to survive financially. I want public officials held accountable, but I don't care if they cover every Ottawa Senators game. I can see those for myself on television, I can listen to them on radio. And I can probably find several blogs who will tell me a lot about about the team and its play.
A web site doesn't need to be able to do both things. I don't need (or particularly want) all my information about the world to be delivered from the same place. The question of whether or not a web site can afford to devote itself to the types of investigations that hold public officials accountable is an important one. Maybe. Maybe not.
But newspapers need to give me a reason to pick them up. Right now, the most common one for me is to have something interesting to read while I'm eating alone. But if I'm at home, it feels like I'm paying to read what I could find online for free. A wire service story in a newspaper is of no value to me, because I can get that for free online in a version that isn't hours out of date. In most cases, editorials are useless to me, especially unsigned ones.
So why should I pay good money for something I don't make time to read, which has a lot of content I may not want to read? Maybe the future of the newspaper business needs to be in working with the abilities online opens up. What do they need to do to make their service something people would be willing to spend money on? Maybe they have to realize that people tend to want specific types of news.
I come at this as somebody who lives 45 minutes from the nearest city. So their "local" news tends to be a little remote to me. Local news is great, and so my local news needs are met by the local weekly newspaper. The city's local news? Not what I need. But I really appreciate their sports coverage of my favorite hockey team.
I'd also want good coverage of politics and government in both Canada and the United States. And a good source of basic world news. But I don't need one source for that. But how to specialize and provide a service that people will pay for. If I had the answer to that, I'd probably be richer than I am now!
I read an interesting article this morning from the New York Times Magazine by Emily Gould, a former Gawker editor, about her experiences with blogging.
She gave an honest look at what she liked and disliked about blogging, how it affected her relationship with a boyfriend who was in an important way Gould's polar opposite. He "went out of his way to keep his online presence minimal."
But as somebody who read neither Emily Magazine (her personal blog) nor Gawker (where she'd worked), it was her comments about why people (and she herself) blog which got me thinking:
I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there's a place where a record of their existence is kept -- a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you. Sometimes that house is messy, sometimes horrifyingly so. In real life, we wouldn't invite any passing stranger into these situations, but the remove of the Internet makes it seem O.K.
Personally, my blogging habits have changed. I used to obsessively journal publicly. I have a LiveJournal that will be six years old tomorrow. For a long time, I tended to make multiple posts there each day. An "unjournaled" day was almost unheard of. But for the last year or so, my LJ has gone largely gone silent.
Some of that has been changes in my life. I'm no longer a single guy, with little life outside of work, who would write on the Internet because I needed to be noticed and listened to, and because I wanted a place where I could hope for honest, but supportive, feedback. It was a place where I could be honestly myself, without worry about my reputation or those around me. I took great care to ensure that, where I had complaints about a person, I tried to make that person impossible to identify. I even used different levels of security for posts, hiding work-related posts from the public, as well as from those trusted users who lived nearby.
The biggest part of that was finding a relationship where I could be honest, and I've been blessed to find that and to look forward to marrying that special woman.
But, given that I have this blog, it's obvious that the desire to share my thoughts has not completely disappeared. (But the fact that my last post is more than a month old also tells you something.)
I'm not sure why I blog. And Gould talked about a blogger's motivation:
The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn't realize was that those ideas and that urgency -- and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head -- could just disappear.
And I don't know whether I'm just trying to be a blogger when I'm not, or just trying to be a different type of blogger than I really am. But for now, I'll just recommend the article and then pose one question:
Why do you blog?
On my last entry which was posted what seems like years ago (but was actually only a couple of months), I received a comment letting me know I'd been tagged with a meme. So, to jump back into blogging, let me respond to that.
First (as required) the instructions:
So, with Rule #1 out of the way...
Introverted - Hardly a surprise to anybody who knows me, I am an off-the-charts introvert, and definitely need to make sure I get time to myself for recharging. That said, once I know you, you may wish I'd stop talking sometimes. :-)
Athletically-challenged - I remember thinking I was using my head, as a former cross-country runner, when I signed up in Grade 7 for the 1500 meters in the school track meet. After all, there were only two other runners entered, so I'd be a shoo-in to make the team for the county meet. I also was signed up for a couple of other events (since the whole grade had to take part, we had to participate in a certain number of events). And I was very consistent: I came dead last in every event. The teacher who was the starter for the 1500m was recruiting competitors at the starting line, so I didn't even make it to the school team for the county meet. And I still remember a gym teacher over the PA, as I rounded the final curve calling out: Get off the track; clear the track; there is still a runner on the track.
News junkie - Breaking news: I'm there! Live events really grab me. (In fact, the writing of this post was interrupted by watching a California highway chase on CNN Headline News).
Well that's there, and I'm taking the blogger's perogative, and I'm going to ignore Rule #3, because I don't like the coercion involved in telling somebody they should do something; at least, when it's me doing the telling.
That's the meme, and I hope to be back soon with a "real" post.
First (as required) the instructions:
Here are the rules:
- You have to post the rules before you give your answers.
- You must list one fact about yourself beginning with each letter of your middle name. (If you don't have a middle name, use your maiden name or your mother's maiden name).
- At the end of your blog post, you need to tag one person (or blogger of another species) for each letter of your middle name. (Be sure to leave them a comment telling them they've been tagged.)
So, with Rule #1 out of the way...
Introverted - Hardly a surprise to anybody who knows me, I am an off-the-charts introvert, and definitely need to make sure I get time to myself for recharging. That said, once I know you, you may wish I'd stop talking sometimes. :-)
Athletically-challenged - I remember thinking I was using my head, as a former cross-country runner, when I signed up in Grade 7 for the 1500 meters in the school track meet. After all, there were only two other runners entered, so I'd be a shoo-in to make the team for the county meet. I also was signed up for a couple of other events (since the whole grade had to take part, we had to participate in a certain number of events). And I was very consistent: I came dead last in every event. The teacher who was the starter for the 1500m was recruiting competitors at the starting line, so I didn't even make it to the school team for the county meet. And I still remember a gym teacher over the PA, as I rounded the final curve calling out: Get off the track; clear the track; there is still a runner on the track.
News junkie - Breaking news: I'm there! Live events really grab me. (In fact, the writing of this post was interrupted by watching a California highway chase on CNN Headline News).
Well that's there, and I'm taking the blogger's perogative, and I'm going to ignore Rule #3, because I don't like the coercion involved in telling somebody they should do something; at least, when it's me doing the telling.
That's the meme, and I hope to be back soon with a "real" post.
Recent Comments