“Hear It Now, See It Tonight, Read It Tomorrow”

That used to be a common adage in the media world, reflecting the means of news production: radio (now), television (tonight), and of course, newspapers (tomorrow). Reading all about it the following day used to be totally fine, until not too long ago when information became instantaneous, rendering the newspaper an anachronism.

After all, when you read “today’s paper” — and yes, I have been reading the print edition since late childhood, basically — what you’re looking at is yesterday’s news. As I wrote in the last post, there is only today, but let’s put that aside for now. In the last few months, I got rid of my twitter account and turned off news alerts.

So far this has been a boon to my mental health, although I do miss at times the ability to dip into a real-time feed of what’s going on everywhere in the world, even though the human mind probably did not evolve to be able to handle that informational vortex. It is like drinking from a firehose, and you come away from it empty.

As someone who has had some experience with breaking news, I can assert that the news is broken, fundamentally, at a time when it is more needed than ever. The underlying business model no longer can sustain the journalistic enterprise, for the most part; even the so-called New Media appear to be failing, by some accounts.

With newspapers specifically, the last ones standing will probably be the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post (at least as long as Bond supervillain Jeff Bezos owns it). And meanwhile, local papers across the board are being gutted, to the shame and detriment of the Republic. We are in apocalyptic times.