It's Alive!!!!!

Jeff Jarvis made me think about news in a way that I haven’t previously considered; news is alive. Not alive like you and me, but in a way it is alive. I figure the news is one step above what Hedges predicts our future generations to be like, but one step below Carr’s robots. Almost like a virus in that it shows all the characteristics of life, but it needs another life form in order to survive and reproduce. (In this metaphor we would be the other life form.) In class we’ve talked about all the different places we get news and the pros and cons, but never did we talk about how all sources are necessary.

Jarvis says that stories don’t have a beginning and an end. I agree with this. Even when a story is late breaking, it’s not new. There is tons of background information that is needed in order to explain and discuss the news, and all that background info has background info. But where does the background info come from? The same places we get ‘new’ news from. Some things we dismiss as gossip could still give us useful background information for later news.

Besides never beginning, the news is never ending either. Because we have all these outlets to get information news can travel and change. For example, a story could break out on the news networks, then the blogs take that information and put their own twist on it, word is spread around people, then some crazy person does something crazy (because that’s what crazy people do, they do crazy things, thus the title crazy) regarding their opinion on the story, and that act become late breaking news. Even that ‘late breaking news’ is just a continuation of the same story.

Staying with the idea of a never changing story, look at history. Stories that happened hundreds of years ago are still being spread around today.

There are two quotes that I really liked in this reading:

“The notion that news comes in and stories go out.” I just really liked the way he phrased this. What is the difference between news and stories? The obvious answer is that news is more factual, but is it? Or is the real difference just the title?

“Who brings that together? It’s not always the reporter or editor anymore. It can just as easily be the reader(s) now.” We are part of the news spreading community. I think that this increases our interest in the news. Let’s go back to what people said in the first post. People don’t read news for their own pleasure, most of the time. The read it because it’s something that is seen as conversational, and if you can’t converse about it then there is something wrong with you.