Are your viral news platforms giving you all the news you need?

maravich

On November 28, 1972, I scored two baskets in a hard-fought varsity basketball game against the Key School. I know this because the next morning, my picture was in the paper making one of them, my Pete Maravich-like hair flopping in black and white. (Admittedly, my haircut was pretty much the only part of my game that resembled Pistol Pete’s.) 

My mom cut that sophomore-year photo and the accompanying article out of the paper. And so did some of my neighbors. And some parents of classmates. And a local insurance agent. By week’s end, I think there were about a dozen clippings of that photo in the basket on our kitchen counter where my family kept important stuff that we didn’t know what to do with.

Forty years ago, that’s how news went viral. If someone saw something they thought you’d be interested in—that article with tips for stopping the hiccups, that Dear Abby column about the weird aunt that sounded eerily like your own, that J.C. Penney advertisement about the sale on bellbottoms—they’d stick it in an envelope and send it your way. Grand-mothers were especially good at it.

Today, of course, there’s much greater efficiency. Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter give us the capacity to share news with our network of connections (and beyond, if we want) even before we’ve read to the bottom.

On top of the links that my friends suggest that I see, I also partake of a regular dose of Daily Show and Ellen clips, the best of NPR and The Atlantic and some self-indulgent Buzz Feed quizzes that give me critical insight into things like what kind of dog my personality most resembles or what Disney princess I am (answers: Golden Retriever and Cinderella). 

I’ve also signed up for news alerts from The Washington Post and The Richmond Times-Dispatch and subscribe to regular e-news services from Virginia Business magazine, RichmondBizSense.com and Fairfax County EDA’s thrice-weekly e-Bird. And if you’re not yet subscribing to Next Draft, do yourself a favor and sign up today.  It’s free and the best (and most creative) aggregator of the most talked-about news stories of the day.

Through it all, I feel reasonably well-informed. And yet, all this digital news acquisition is not enough.

Whenever I interview someone for a job or internship at The Hodges Partnership, I toss a lot of softballs the way of the applicant, questions that sound more like we’re shooting the breeze than anything else. But the question I’m most interested in I slip in when they least expect it: how do you get your news?

What I hope to hear—but rarely, if ever, do—is that they read the morning newspaper. Ideally, and I know this sounds old-fashioned to Millennials, they will tell me that they subscribe to the paper and physically pick it up off their front steps every morning and that by the time they’ve finished their morning coffee, they’ve caught up with what has happened around the world and around the block. And only then, if there’s something they’ve read they want to share, they will pull it up online before posting it elsewhere.

I worry that if we rely too heavily on viral news sharing as the sole source of our news—as many people do today—we run the risk of being too self-selective, in other words, that we will consume only the news that others have decided we should see. The value of the daily newspaper is that a team of smart and largely truthful and objective journalists have put together a fairly comprehensive rundown of the news that an informed, engaged citizen should know. You may be cynical about the news media, but no one does it better than daily newspapers.

Your grand-mothers are actually onto something.

(Image via halestormsports.com)

Josh Dare

Josh’s career in communications spans more than four decades. In addition to providing strategic counsel and crisis communications direction to clients, he is the resident Writer-In-Chief, regularly writing op-eds and bylines on behalf of clients that have been published in The Washington Post, The Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Huffington Post, among others.

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