Terrian Journals' News To Me: missing facts, stories, questions, & usage

Did you hear the news? Maybe not. Read this book and find out what you're missing.

Read all about it! It's all here, or at least some of it, in column centimetres times two.

It's hot off the presses and cool off the screen.

In this "information age" where the "information highway" is becoming a toll road and the "free flow of information" is a cross between diarrhea and constipation, it's becoming more and more difficult to know who, what, when, where, how, and why.

Terrian Journals' News To Me is about more than what news is, it's about the why of the what, when, where, and how. The why frames all the rest. It explains ''news judgement'', ''editorial decisions'', ''lineup'', ''headlines'', ''local interest'', and the vast domain of ''coverage''.

This book is about the news and specific news stories that illustrate what does and does not get into the news and what shape it's in when it arrives. It's about missing facts, stories, details, and even word usage. A number of things become sludge compacted into an amount. "All the news", "all the time" makes it possible to know everything and almost nothing simultaneously. It's drowning in-depth coverage. It's the same old stories being repeated almost endlessly every few moments, with identical pre-recorded words from formerly live, direct, and still unedited reports.

News rooms pile on the news of the moment until it breaks from the weight of stalker-like reporting, commentator obssession, and mulling over the same sources' last breaths, while the story is completely smothered, rendering the news audience unconscious.

Getting "all the news", "all the time" every day never really happens. The news lineup topples over in irregular shapeless forms which are confusing, overwhelming, uninforming, and disappointing.

If it's weeds it leads and continuity blurs until fading to black. Fluffy features replace sharp ones, muting, muffling, diverting, and distracting. Balanced news becomes a story about a climate change emergency placed between two fossil fuel commercials and a feature about the latest internal combustion vehicles at the car show. Paying advertisers love this ''objectitivy'' in a ''crisis''

The last words of the news broadcast trivialize all that comes before, as every news host must comment or jest about things s/he knows little about in a trivial pursuit.

From headlines to updates, you really don't know what you're missing, if the newsroom goes on a tangent, covering only one story ad nauseum, for hours, days, months, or years. When a single news story goes viral, it renders the newsroom invalid and destroys all functioning brain cells of the news audience. No matter how many times something goes viral, no immunity is created. No investigative reporting unit is sent out to find an antidote, a vaccine, or a cure for what's infecting newsrooms.

You don't know what you're missing if you're getting all your news from only one source, from only one part of the world, and in only one language. Different angles, coverage, and details are missing links between you and what's happening all around you, close by and far away. The same old story gets more priority than unleashing news hounds, intensive questioning, highly detailed reporting, and nit-picking editorial work. And when all these essential elements of story-telling are lost, the full story may never be told.

Here is the news... (continued on page one of Terrian Journals' News To Me)