New Newsworthy News

One of the interesting consequences of the rise of the Internet is the death of the newspaper. The daily newspaper traditionally performed the following tasks:

First, they provided news. This function started to become obsolete not long after someone invented television/radio/telegraph, but now people read their news all kinds of places, like blogs or, more chillingly, the Fox news website. Say what you want about the relative merits of those things as news sources, but the fact is that from the point of view of someone choosing what media to consume, they're far more convenient (and, often, cheaper) than a newspaper. Of course, newspapers do offer something the Internet rarely does, which is local news. Unfortunately, local television stations generally cover large-scale local news. Local news in small towns such as my hometown usually makes its way via word of mouth, but I suppose there's still a market for poorly-formatted stories with bad spelling in those cases, if only because nobody else gives a shit. Much other local news, such as how Mr and Mrs Thaliomide have been knitting sweaters in the same shop for twenty years, is the kind of thing I'm OK with missing.

Second, they provided classifieds. If you wanted a job, you had Help Wanted. If you wanted to buy or sell something, you had classified ads. If you wanted to get it on, there were personals. Today, we have Craigslist for all three, not counting Monster or eBay or OkCupid. Really, the internet is mostly about either selling things or sex, and often it's about selling sex.

But I worry a little bit about the loss of newspapers. Oh, not newspapers themselves. I don't read newspapers, though I do get the The Economist. I worry about our headlines. I mean, look at these. Good stuff, am I right? But as we start to transition into a world where space is no longer an issue, I fear we'll find ourselves in a world without pithy headlines like that. Luckily, I have a solution.

Eventually, it seems, we're not going to be able to rely on editors' headline abilities to pressure them into hilarity. Instead, we're going to have to make the source material great. This entire blog post comes from a thought I had last night--while I was going to sleep, so I have no idea of the surrounding mental context--that went something like "Man, what if I just tried to make everything I did crazy interesting enough that people would just say 'what'?" My thoughts, before they drifted into complete unconsciousness where I resumed work on my Inception sequel, were pretty favorable! For example, when I win a game of pool, traditionally, I would slap the loser. But, under this system, I would slap him. To death. Much better headline, right?