Since I no longer hold a copy of the Chronicle in my hand as I ride the BART, but read it on-line, I tend to go back and read Jon Carroll’s columns in bursts of four or five, rather than as a daily thing. It’s a matter of convenience, and really they are just as good a week later as they were on the day of publication, particularly as I am not going to attend any show or concert or meeting he happens to mention. So I’ve just come across his column from last Thursday, the 13th, wherein he says, among other things:
And here's another thing: No one (except people in the news business) cares about scoops. The news cycle is now seven minutes; no one knows where the fresh information comes from. It all goes into the info-stew, where it is massaged and analyzed and used for partisan and/or entertainment purposes. Back in the day, when newspapers were king and the news cycle was one day, a big splashy exclusive in the afternoon edition sold tens of thousands of copies. There was an economic point to scoops. Now it's just an archaic way of keeping score.
That made me think about a bit in Lost Horizon, where the hero muses that the long-lived monks operate on a different time-frame, and therefore it makes perfect sense that just as somebody who reads a newspaper in the morning will wait a whole day for another, the residents of Shangri-La are perfectly happy to read no news of less than five years’ vintage.
Your Humble Blogger is trying to curtail his habit of checking Google News just before shutting off the computer and going to bed. I will not sleep any better for knowing the latest allegation of short-sightedness, malfeasance or plain incompetence on the part of Our Only President or his cronies, nor will I actually sleep any better for having read the headline on some uplifting or satisfying item. Either there will be nothing of particular interest, in which case I needn’t have bothered, or there will be something I want to look into in more detail, in which case it is an inopportune moment. Whatever the case, it can wait until morning.
On the other hand, I would feel frustrated and ignorant if I only got my news in the morning, and didn’t update my universe during the day a few times. It’s oddly satisfying when I look at the paper (or the paper’s web site) in the morning to say to myself ‘ah, yes, that story.” It’s about being in on something, which is one of the most profound motivations there is. I want to be, well, not the first to know, but I want to know early, and more important, I want other people to find out after I already know. I want the scoop.
Of course, Jon Carroll is right that I neither care nor remember where I got it. In 1993 or so, a clever person mentioned to me that when somebody says in conversation that ‘I heard somewhere’ or ‘Someone was talking about’ followed by some analysis of international relations or a fascinating new book or any news or cultural item, that person listens to NPR. These days, of course, the person may just read blogs, aggregators or just get the occasional email tip. And the via marks on those are nice and all, but when I’m showing off my erudition in conversation, I’m saying “I heard somewhere...”
And the point is to be able to say that without the other person saying “Oh, yes, that was on Fresh Air, but I’ve heard that they edited out the interesting part, because ...” Which reminds me, Mr. Carroll refers to the famous four CBS workers as having been fired; in fact, only one was fired, while the other three were asked for their resignations. The distinction would be without a difference if they had in fact given their resignations, but it seems that so far, at least, they have not. Or so I’ve heard.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
As someone else who reads Google News right before bedtime, I wanted to construct an argument by counter-example, mentioning various times that I’ve found a Google News story which allowed me to sleep better or convinced me to take some action which could not have waited until morning.
Um, yeah, well, ok. So nothing springs to mind. But Lisa listens to NPR before I’m up in the morning sometimes, and it’s nice to be essentially caught up when I wake up. That seems like a good rationale.
Really, though, it’s part of checking my e-mail before going to sleep. And that one is actually productive sometimes, since I can exchange e-mails with an author in Japan or Australia without the usual half-day spacing.
I actively avoid Google News (and, for that matter, checking email) right before going to bed, because I’m quite capable of lying awake fretting all night after reading one distressing thing. Even if I was barely awake before I read whatever it was.
But then, I’ve never been much into news. I only started checking it obsessively after 9/11; before that I often went days, maybe even sometimes weeks, without encountering any news except what co-workers and email lists were talking about.
A friend who lived in California briefly told me, on deciding to move back East, that one of the main things wrong with California was that the evening news was on time-delay, so you were getting the news three hours after it happened. I couldn’t imagine that being important enough to make someone move across the country—especially since it implied an unspoken assumption that east-coast news was the only important news. (If something happens in California at 11 p.m. Pacific time, the east coast won’t hear about it ’til they get up in the morning.)
In response to Jed’s “If something happens in California at 11 p.m. Pacific time….”: Well, there are those of us who routinely stay up ’til 3 or 4 Eastern…. I mean, someone on the East Coast has to make sure California hasn’t fallen into the ocean or anything.