Thinking out loud

I used to be an RSS junkie. I had 20 feeds, I skimmed the entire batch on a daily basis, and it took me over an hour to read everything. One day I discovered I had better things to spend my time on, and quit.

Two or three relapses later, I broke the habit, and something funny happened: I had to stick to glancing over a small handful of sites on a regular basis.

And something funny happened.

I kept checking Time Magazine, Ars Technica, and Reddit, but all the big news outlets went.

No more CNN.

And why? Because CNN was breaking stories a day after the new media outlets discovered it, and a day before Time wrote a thorough, well-sorted explanation.

In hindsight, Ars was doing the same thing with science-technology issues. The day after CNN ran the Megan Meier story, Ars wrote a better story that actually covered the issues, instead of just the event.

That's not to say CNN is doing a bad job, just that they're reporting on a very microscopic level.

Which brings me back to the Missourian.

I spent the second half of the summer working on the Public Safety Beat, and wound up covering this controversy emerging from the Columbia police being armed with tasers.

It was an incredibly complicated story. We had documented cases where police used a taser (usually just as a threat) to put an end to a violent confrontation without anyone getting hurt. At the same time, all of Columbia saw the man who fell off the bridge over the summer, and I met an 18-year-old kid, who, after being the victim of an assault, was tasered 5 times by an officer who may have fudged his report. The kid was charged, and the prosecutor dropped the case and advised the kid to sue the city.

And to top it all off, the public understanding of what a taser is and how it works, including what the Missourian had already printed, was flat out wrong. No fault on the previous reporters; they got their information from the parties leading the debate, and they were confused too.

So there was a place for a compelling, complex narrative that really explored all the different elements in play of a very hot, controversial topic.

We never wrote it.

We wrote a lot of taser stories, but they were always micro. Someone holding a meeting. Someone protesting. Something happened. And yes, we needed to do all of that, but in all these little incidents, any sense of on explanation of what was happening got lost.

The economic crisis is infinitely more complicated than tasers ever were. It needs explanation. And of course, we've been seeing a long string of bad news, but the public needs more than that.

Which is why I really like the idea of having reporters go out and ask people basic questions, to just explain something to the public.

But I think we need to do this on two tiers.

I grew up Jewish fairly financially literate. I always assumed that everyone knew not to put things they couldn't afford on credit cards, that you can't pay for things with imaginary money... I'd never even heard of second mortgages.

My freshman year, I learned exactly how wrong I was. The level of not so much irresponsibility
but sheer cluelessness was staggering.

But at the same time, in talking to other people who would never buy things they couldn't pay for in cash about the economy, I noticed something: none of us had the slightest clue what we were talking about.

So perhaps, in addition to asking common sense advice questions for the people who have already found themselves in debt, we should try and make sense of the jargon flying around the regular news. At an earlier time, that would mean finding someone to explain what Freddie Mac actually did. This week, it would be the logic of behind stimulus package, Keynesianism etc. Just whatever is appearing in other stories, especially if they're local.

Will it work? No idea.