It’s made of people

Having just succumbed to the COVID vaccine, I guess you could say I feel a tad strange. Although it may be psychosomatic, I’m feeling pensive and so, I think I may just see where this reflection takes me in case I have an allergic reaction, keel over, my life flashes before my eyes and this column is the last anyone hears from me. I am aware that this is a wee bit dramatic. On my drive to work this morning, I realized what exactly it is that I like about this job, essentially-. Ok, two things. There’s always something to strive for. And newspapers are legendary.

Before I started working as a staff writer, I think I assumed that working as a journalist would be easy. Catching trivial mistakes of news writers brought on a twinge of haughty self-satisfaction and caused me to incorrectly assume that the writers weren’t attentive or worse, that they were just bad at their job. The truth is, it’s very difficult to see your own mistakes, which is why papers have editors. Not to mention the fact that editors are human, (although Patti is basically superhuman.) There’s so much more to writing than just hammering out sentences and getting the names, spellings, the story and the quotes right, and formatting it into AP style. I strive to grow beyond just the technical aspect of the job. Patti strives to become even more awesome than she is and Nate, always looking to the future, will say (half-jokingly, I think) that he aims to revolutionize local media.

But talkin’ bout a revolution might be missing the point. I occasionally get the comment alluding to something like newspapers are a thing of the past. It’s true that with the advent of social media, anyone can have access to a platform. And sadly, print media is withering away. But that doesn’t mean that social media replaces print media. The newspaper has several characteristics that digital social media lacks. Scrolling just doesn’t have the same satisfying crunch as turning through the newspaper. I find that there is no crunch at all in my scrolling. Also, the paper adheres to journalistic standards with a commitment to giving the public unbiased information. Social media is a platform for all information, whether it is factual or objective (or not). A newspaper is a collaborative community resource that anyone and everyone can access. There’s no algorithm, no settings. And yet, this magical relic known as a newspaper possesses an intangible quality, even in it’s physical form. Like Soylent Green, it’s made of people.