Frankly, it's been a while since I've read any good journalism. I mean... any journalism. I read the news occasionally as a print journalism student, but even then not as much as I should have, really. Today I pulled out my New York Times app while my students were taking their tests. And it's the simple, short articles like the one about the Lord of Bedlington, a billionaire non-dairy food company owner from Buffalo, that makes me appreciate a well-written feature article once again. Thank you, Jeré Longman.
Sometimes the news is rough. Protests in Egypt, floods in South Africa, the politics in Lima. But the world is full of stories that are worth telling. And hearing. We just hardly have enough time to live out the stories and hear them. Let alone research them and write them and share them. This is the paradox of our news system today. Or one of them? As I see it, anyway. We have national and global news outlets that share stories we hardly have a connection to, if any. And we have local outlets sharing stories that are much more relevant, but often hardly as interesting. The big outlets must share about crazy things or popular people to appeal to enough consumers that they make their profit. And the local outlets share about crazy-at-a-much-more-local-level things and unknown people to... often not really make a profit (let's be honest).
Maybe that's not a paradox. I probably don't really know what a paradox really means. But I think it's interesting that we try to "keep up" with global news, and in this way maintain a sort of global connection - a small relationship with those around us who "also have heard" about this or that. And we also keep track with local stories - those from friends and family or from our place of work or school, perhaps the town we live in. And this keeps us connected with those others who live the same things we do. What if we went exclusively one way or the other? Global or local. I think we sometimes try, but I think we often fail.
Unfortunately, I have no good wrap up or point or moral. Such are my thoughts. I think what I mostly wanted to do was simply express my appreciation for the feeling I got of reading good feature journalism again. It had just been a while.