Unless something really bizarre happens (like the governor showing up in a pirate’s hat), most of us get little to no news about our state legislature. For example, we’ve yet to hear any on-the-street discussion about possible elimination by state government of property tax relief grants.
Most significant state law proposals change daily when the legislature is in session. Bills are proposed, debated, modified and either passed or rejected––a perfect news source for daily updates, where the effects can be reported, studied and analyzed. But without a large metro-paper for sale here, we’re missing all that during this current session.
There are other sources for information on our state government. Starting this week, you can get the Progress’ weekly update which summarizes what legislators are doing. This is certainly better than nothing but not timely enough to allow you to phone your legislator and ask him to support a position. At a weekly this size, we are limited to one freelance writer covering the General Assembly.
Of course, there are news websites galore, including the Atlanta Journal & Constitution’s. If you really want information, you can find it online with Google. And it’s nice that you will find several different organizations with news and even opinions advanced by involved groups and blogs. All of that is a plus for the online publications.
But, despite the cool interactive online look and approach, there are huge drawbacks to relying on the web for your only news source.
Right off the bat, there is the discipline required to actually search for and read pertinent news. Substantive, unbiased and appropriate information is out there by the gigabyte (for free nonetheless), but so are a million distractions.
With an old-fashioned print publication, many of us might rush over the boring tax policy stories, but we at least caught the headlines or summaries.
On the web, if headlines don’t instantly grab your attention, it’s off to ebay, Facebook, or a site dedicated to football, knitting or any particular interest favored by you.
A newspaper conference speaker reported there is not really a problem with people abandoning newspapers for online reports. The studies show people don’t read much online news either. People are just reading the headlines and moving on.
With a cascade of websites available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, when we go online, too often we get diverted away from the informative to the merely entertaining.
In many cases, maybe it doesn’t matter that we’re uninformed. The fact we here in Jasper, Georgia don’t understand why U.S. forces are having so much trouble in Afghanistan isn’t likely to affect our nation’s policy there. Chances are we common folk won’t be asked our opinions of what we should do there anyway.
Then again, there are times when being uninformed will come back to bite you in the rear. For example, if you get another property tax bill this year (could happen), it would be good to know it’s because of a plan now under consideration in the legislature. It would be better if before lambasting local politicians, you knew it was state legislators and your governor you should burn in effigy to vent your ire.
The problem (and it affects all of us who want to live in a nation where the average person has some idea what is going on) is that too many people aren’t bothering to read news in any format.
All the sources of information make distractions all the more appealing. Instead of taking time to read something good for you, it’s easy to go to youtube and watch stupendous bicycle crashes, or to check what your friends are doing at facebook or to yak in a chat room about how the Jackets shall whup the Dawgs again next year.
Just because the New York Times, AJC or Pickens Progress put all the information in the world (literally) at your fingertips, that doesn’t mean many folks are going to read it. And that’s a problem––not only for newspaper publishers, but for all of us. |
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