A new kind of journalism needed

Part of the point of the last few posts about deoxygenated sea waters, population collapse, oil price pressures & rising car usage, peak food, and the mortgage crisis & post-suburban America, is that they all seem to be examples of "stories broader than the news cycle".

With these stories, we're really seeing specific examples of larger, interlocking global trends, some driven by society, some driving society. The climate is evolving, with specific and often negative fallouts. The economy is evolving, and with it the fundamental ways we live & work. We're all being swept along with the tide here, but too often, the news picks up not on the rise & fall of the tide, but the ebb & flow of the waves on top of the tide.

The standard news media -- by which I mean pretty much everything from mainstream print, broadcast, & online media, as well as many blogs etc -- tends to be fixated on the "story of the moment". That's completely fine if you're keeping on top of things, and just want to get updated on what has happened since yesterday (or this morning, or in the last 10 minutes...). But it generally does a terrible job of stepping back and being reflective, looking at broader patterns and deeper trends.

There are, of course, exceptions. Some of the shows on NPR try to do this, at least some of the time, though they still too-often fall back into the short term type of coverage -- e,g, several minutes of "McCain & Clinton propose gas tax holiday, Obama refuses" this morning, and more this afternoon -- and not enough of the broader analysis: "here's the hoped-for outcome from such a holiday, here's some more likely outcomes, pros, & cons based on previous times such a holiday was offered, etc. I'm being slightly unfair, of course -- they did, after all, offer some of both the short-term & long-term reportage that I'm looking for, but I guess I just feel it didn't get to the heart of the matter as successfully as, say, Krugman did:

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving. Any elasticity in the supply comes earlier in the year, when refiners decide how much to put in inventories. The McCain/Clinton gas tax proposal comes too late for that. So it’s Econ 101: the tax cut really goes to the oil companies.

The Clinton twist is that she proposes paying for the revenue loss with an excess profits tax on oil companies. In one pocket, out the other. So it’s pointless, not evil. But it is pointless, and disappointing.

Clear, concise, contextualized. Maybe not the only side to the story, to be sure, but a good start.

But I digress.

In print, "The Economist" and "The Atlantic" do a better job at this kind of contextualizing, and I'm sure there are others that I'm less familiar with that do, too. I'm sure that there are web sites that do better here also -- Salon? Slate? -- but I'm not familiar with them. (And I can't stand the obtrusive ads on Salon, but nevermind that, as I can appreciate that they've got bills to pay and no print wing or parent company to prop up the web site...)

Maybe the lesson for me here is that I've been wrong for years now, and Google News, with its seductive "here's the current big stories, and some alternate takes on each one", is a terrible way to make sense of what's going on in the world. No one has time to read all those different versions of the same story, and even if you could, you'd still just be skimming across the surface of those broader trends I want to understand. I've never seen the appeal of getting all your news from one site, and while I feel a certain nostalgia for reading the daily newspaper from front to back, I've never for a second felt any desire to read the exact same content from the exact same paper on the web. If you're going to the web anyway, you might as well seek alternative points of view, right? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe "alternative" is just "more noise".

Hm.