I often find myself disagreeing with what Seth Godin has to say, but I get a great deal out of reading his work anyway, because he has a knack for identifying the essential elements of an issue. So, even if I disagree with Godin’s conclusions, what he has to say often provokes further consideration on my part, so that I can approach ideas with a different perspective.
Of course, sometimes Godin also simply hits the nail on the head. That was the case in an entry he wrote on “Journalists” in his book Small Is The New Big. The article wasn’t really about journalism so much as it was about the choice any writer might make about what to write.
Godin worried about the ease with which many writers choose superficial and unoriginal topics, saying, “When you run a post accusing a politician of having no personality… you’re indulging the public’s desire to elect a dinner partner, not a president. When you chime in on the day’s talking points, you’re a tool, not a new voice.”
As I read these words, I thought about Google News, which I once thought of as a great source of information, but have come to use less frequently over the last year or so. The problem with Google News is that it offers too much repetition. The same story, often written by the Associated Press or Reuters, is published over and over again, and it’s often difficult, even upon a sharpened search, to find something other than a single, limited account of an event.
Just as often, I find that there’s no coverage of an event on Google News at all. If the AP doesn’t send a reporter to cover a story, then there’s often no story at all. So, I have come to question why the stories on Google News that are popular, and thus on the front page, are popular in the first place. Is it because they’re timely, or important, or interesting – or is it just that they’re well-promoted, and thus popular within the realm of what a few voices offer?
Google Blogsearch brings more varied information and perspectives, but Godin has an important point: Too many bloggers have become little more than elaborate bookmarking services, pointing the way to mainstream news and opinion articles that happen to pique their interest. Like newspapers that stuff their pages with wire service content, they, given the chance to create, merely repeat.
It’s easy to take this kind of thinking too far. There are some very good reasons for some news stories to be popular – such as that they’re genuinely important to people. For that reason, here at Irregular Times, we try to create a blend of articles about major news stories and stories about information we’ve come across on our own. Our goal is to find irregular eddies, but to locate them so that people can see how they relate to the mainstream flow, creating some difference, but with relevance.
So it is that you’ll find recent articles discuss the West Virginia primary, but also stories that have received little mainstream attention, such as the blockage of new rules to protect the North Atlantic right whale and an odd, incoherent piece of legislation trying to create a government-sponsored Year of the Bible.
Surrounded as we are with powerful megamedia communications, it can be difficult for us to learn to perceive anything but the standard stories of the day. For those who are interested in escaping the regularized voices of the world, an important first step is to cancel the cable TV subscription. But then what?
Here are a few tips for where to look for original information to write about:
The Library of Congress legislative site contains information about fascinating bills and political leaders you’ll never read about in a newspaper. This isn’t just political content. It’s also a reflection of the issues that people believe are important enough to be dealt with by the US Congress – a window on the way we live.
Hate mail is rarely welcome, but it brings us ideas that we would otherwise be reluctant to think about. Maybe you don’t get hate mail yourself, but there’s plenty circulating around anyway on blogs and by email – against political candidates, products, companies and countries. The medium of hate mail is raw and often amusing, revealing dimensions of meaning that often remain obscured in more refined forms of communication.
Writing about your writing can be overdone, but every now and then it’s useful for you to examine what your projects are, and the changes in your language and subject matter over time can reveal important stories that may lead you to revise your focus.
Telling the story of where you live is increasingly difficult, as homogenization of culture, and alienation from location are strong trends. Fight the trend. Swim upstream. Look at where you live and write about it. If you believe that where you live is not important, then what are you doing living there? If what you do day in and day out is not interesting, then why are you doing it?
Get out the map and find other places, if writing about your own locality feels too close to home. Choose something small and out of the way. Manhattan is overexposed. The town of Wann, Oklahoma is hardly ever in the news at all.
Great riff!