The Problem Is Not The News

Yesterday, the respected editorial writer for the Arizona Republic, Doug MacEachern, harangued a blogger for taking pleasure in writing about the demise of newspapers.

"That is the irony of the loss of the Rocky Mountain News. There is no diminished demand for its product. For its paper product, yes. And for its advertising space. But not for its genuine product, the news. The 'Rocky' earned four Pulitzers in the last decade. Its problem was not its news."

No, the problem is not its news. The problem is not to confuse news with information. To me, news means information that is investigated, verified and delivered in a timely manner with precise writing. Therefore, blogs do not provide news. This blog, for example, offers information and personal opinion, but not news.

Information and news are two different animals. Imagine the different amount of work goes into the news and blog posts. Anybody can write a blog post in thirty minutes while all the news pieces require fact checking, editing, writing and rewriting. That’s a difference between McDonald’s and six-course French dinner. If blogs could ever replace newspaper and magazines, it would have happened within the past few hundred years since the first English-language newspaper appeared in Amsterdam in 1620.

If curiosity as a human nature triggered the very existence and prosperity of news, then suspicion is another human nature that keeps gossip and incredible information away from trustworthy news.

If there is a problem with news today, it is that we need it more than any other time in human history. By that, I don't refer to information. Ask yourself a question as a reader: how much do you trust the information you read on a blog. We all need trustworthy news, particularly in an information-overloading time like this.

So I would like to echo what Mr. MacEachern had to say that the problem is not its news. And I also empathize his sentiment for getting a little defensive as an old-fashioned journalist over the topic of the demise of the print. But seriously, reminiscing as much as you like, but the truth is even if we devour McDonald’s day and night, what we really crave for is the French feast.