"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

Webster's dictionary defines news as....no, just kidding. I'm tired of going to CNN and seeing a "news" story about some random person experiencing some random event. "old woman shoots herself over her mortgage"; "mother drowns kids". This is not news; these are little hits of anti-intellectual crack.

There are two key reasons why The Media lives by the mantra "If it bleeds, it leads". The first is that blood (or anything shocking) is entertaining. Most people are aware of this infotainment phenomena, so let's move on. The second reason is that The Media can waive these shiny stories in front of the sheep like dangling keys. They are very digestible...there are clearly defined roles of good and evil. While standing around the water cooler, everyone can feel comfortable agreeing that the mother (who drowned her kids) is "bad". The woman with the mortgage/foreclosure is a "sad" story, and everyone feels for her. Nice little packages of total agreement.

On the other hand, the real "news" is often complicated, controversial, and without resolution. It can't just be dangled, the news-seeker must proactively digest it. And after great struggle, the news-seeker is often left with more questions than answers.

Unfortunately, the average person doesn't have the time or the energy (never mind the intellect) to digest real news stories. And this inability, combined with the apathy, is proving deadly. Real news has a chance to directly impact the lives of people. My life will not be any different whether or not some random woman went crazy and killed her kids. I live in a world with billions of human beings. I took science and psychology classes. I'm well aware that some people are crazy and do crazy things. I will never be one of those people who clicks my tongue and says "oh my god, how could a mother kill her kids? That's so horrible!". Yes, it's horrible, but it's a natural set of outliers that exists in humanity. And it will happen again next week.

The silver lining of the the death of the newspaper industry is that they could develop the niche skill of actually reporting news. From a practical standpoint, they'll never be able to compete with the Internet or CNN in terms of delivering time-sensitive "current events" (or even the leading stories of blood). However, they could refocus their energies on reporting on real news in depth. There used to be a time where a reporter actually investigated issues. There's still a need for that in our society, and I hope and pray that we'll get back to a time where "news" means something more than a guy eating a 20 pound burger in Pennsylvania (although, did you see that story? b/c that burger was HUGE!)