I am often asked, as a professor of journalism, where I get my news.
I’d like to rattle off the names of sources that my interlocutor has never heard of so that I come across as a consummate insider.
In truth, though, I’m about as traditional as can be, aside from the fact that I get my jolt of morning news online (except on Sundays, when it arrives on my doorstep in a blue plastic bag).
I am, first of all, slavishly devoted to The New York Times, even though I readily agree with those who find it maddeningly elitist (as in: “What You Get: $2,000,000 Homes in New York, Chicago and Texas”).
The Times deserves its reputation as a bastion of great journalism. But I also read it for the same reason I root for the hated Yankees: It’s what I grew up with.
While kids in other parts of the country came to newspapers by way of the funnies, we New York kids had only the Al Hirschfeld caricatures of theatre people in the humorless Times. The fun of that, as all aging Times aficionados know, was finding the name of the artist’s daughter, Nina, blended into the hair or sleeve of a Barbra Streisand or a Zero Mostel.
True, New Yorkers could also pick up the Daily News, whose cartoons were read on the radio by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia during a newspaper delivery strike in 1945. But my dad was a theatre guy and a crossword guy, which meant he was a Times guy and that I was destined to be a Times guy too.
So I start my days with all the news that’s fit to print – specifically, I must confess, with the baseball news – then sample the rest of the paper, then go to the Guardian.
Word to the wise there: If you type guardian.com you’ll land on the website of a glass company. Theguardian.com – note definite article – gets you to the news site.
The Guardian has more fluff than The Times – as in “Funny Animal Pictures Awards” – but it is also a good antidote to The Times’ parochialism. For all the strides the NYT has made as a national and international news source, it can still feel like it is only dimly aware of an America beyond Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor.
If the world has gone mad overnight, I might next check the Washington Post, or the BBC, or NPR or the Huffington Post, or any paper close to wherever the madness is occurring. (When Ukraine was the world’s hottest hot spot I dropped in daily on the English-language Kyiv Post.)
On a calm morning, I will turn my attention to the local. I check ‘em all: StateCollege.com, the CDT, the Collegian, Onward State. My capsule review of the lot: too much football, not enough of everything else.
Does this routine make me a news junkie? How about stooge of the corporate media? I know people who skip the so-called legacy media and go to the newer kids on the block: ProPublica, Politico, Reddit, Wikinews, etc.
I should, too. As much as I hammer away at the importance of being well informed, though, I also think it’s possible to consume too much journalism. I think of the old Cuban generals, veterans of the Spanish-American War, looking on as Fidel Castro is about to assume power in a piece by Norman Lewis, a vastly underappreciated travel writer and novelist.
“Alas,” the older of the two generals concludes, “haven’t I seen it all before?”
I’m not as world-weary as that, but so much of what passes for news is trivia “magnifie(d) into undue importance,” as a reporter named Mark Twain put it, that the best way to stay sane is to put your head down and let it wash over you, like a wave.
When I feel news-weariness setting in, I know it’s time to step away and read something timeless, or quit reading altogether and get outside.
Last week I stood on a little blue bridge in Spring Creek Canyon and made a note to self:
Come back when the wind is up and the leaves are falling. One can watch the leaves tack and spiral anywhere, but here there’s the bonus of seeing them touch down in water and float downstream.
Then I made another note: Start going to Millbrook Marsh at dusk. I was there a couple of Octobers ago and saw a huge flock of birds twisting and ribboning in ways that reminded me of a band marching pictorially on a football field.
I don’t know what kind of birds they were because they were silhouetted against the evening sky and frankly, I don’t know my birds all that well, but I would love to see the same spectacle again this year.
Ezra Pound called poetry “news that stays news.” I’d say the same for the change of season.
