Hello, News!

By Richard Laermer, Guest Author

It’s a cool world when people can talk to each other with some semblance of knowledge. Every now and then (never at cocktail parties) I find myself in a semi-cultured conversation about, no, not the latest Seinfeld-cursed-TV gig (poor Julia isn’t even on the schedule, some “big hit,” huh?), but some new non-pop music thing, not Courtney Love’s latest-hyped fiasco but something brand spanking new.

Or someone at a bus stop will see me reading Martin Amis and discuss his essay in the London Times on small minds thinking big. And it’s not cruising; that’s called conversation.

Thank you for allowing me a rant.

The reason I go there is that for the last eight years the Web’s “personalization” sites have single-handedly killed any sense of cultured knowledge.

All that my crap – myyahoo, mywashingtonpost, and on the bizarre side of the spectrum, mynervemag – has led us down a wily path of surreal masturbatory know-how.

We ended up not giving credence to anyone we didn’t care for. That’s just no way to live.

According to experts I interviewed for a forthcoming book, “2011,” all this is going to end rapidly and not a freaking second too soon.

Since our moneyed society has been on wobbly economic and often wounded legs, people have found that being informed (now that we have time) is the way to get up on latest trends and happenings, and to learn which industries to dive into.

I mean, soon we will be walking around with electronic tablets instead of papers, but it doesn’t have to be simply interactive delivery of stocks, sports and breast sizes (are they real?) of those big stars.

Digital media in the oh so near future will force us to see the good, the bad and the strange–at a glance–but at least we’ll finally see it all.

While I suppose you could catch a “CNN International program at 3 a.m., soon interactive news will mean a broader world, said NBC’s used-to-be-wunderkind Jeff Zucker, “an extraordinary convergence that in effect allows us to see much more than ever before.””

For viewers of the real news, according to veteran news guy Jon Klein of CNN, networks will put up a “barker channel” that will steer you to interactive apps.

“If you’ve got a digital set-top box, it enables you to get an interactive CBS. You can watch the basic channel, which tells you where everything else is,” Klein told me.

But let’s say you want to watch more stuff on a U.S. plane downed in China, you can simply click here. It looks like Headline News except you will be able to click on the little paragraphs to get info on the story in full-motion, broadcast-quality video.

Dreams like that bode well for us.

My elders told me the folks who didn’t dive off rooftops in post-1929 Great Crash days were the well-informed ones: They saw the cultural indicators that told them to react – fast! In post-post Crash 2000 we are best to follow our forefathers’ advice and visit “all-yahoo” instead of “my.”

And true, we’ll still dote on – and probably go right to – the bad news.

Says Jim Fallows, media guru and longtime observer of all things mental: “There are the two types of bad news and customizability hasn’t killed either: One is the spectacle stuff and the other is the actual bad news, like the economy.”

Soon there will be a digitally defined hierarchy, Fallows insists: “You will get mainstream news, the crud we see every day. And then premium, or real, insightful news that will make you think.” He calls this first-class and other coach. (Are you listening, marketing friends?)

Local camera crews can exhale, for there will always be classy and not-so-much TV news pumping out the bad stories about health hazards and rape and car crashes.

Yet people who make the news are coming to grips with a news flash: Digital doesn’t need to mean trivial.

I heard Matt Drudge, master of light and airy, once say: “Sure it will be digital, but it will be larger, more gorgeous than ever before, and completely and utterly fascinating, in order to grab attention” of an ingrained, thrill-seeking world.

And a super well-informed one at that.