The story

Tonight while noodling my way through St. Paul to avoid the now ever-present traffic on 280, I heard a really interesting show on MPR. It's called The Story, and features lengthy interviews with regular folks.

Yup, that's it. Regular folks...telling their stories. According to its website, the show tries to get at major topics of the day--like Iraq, health care, and politics--by letting individual soldiers, doctors, and voters talk about their lives. They intentionally do not interview think tank people, market analysts, or politicians.

While listening to a woman named Nancy talk about growing up in the family business, I realized how truly disenchanted I am with mainstream news. Perhaps finally disenchanted enough to seek out alternatives. I just feel like there is a gaping hole--so much beneath the surface of every issue that doesn't come out in most news coverage. I finally understand why my dad has turned to current event blogs and cannot fathom why I still rely mostly on newspapers. But I find those blogs are often full of even less-informed punditry than the mainstream media stories. A recent FutureTense story got me thinking that citizen journalism may meet my needs more. The brief story highlighted how actively citizen journalists are covering the bridge collapse, and it rang very true. I had already turned to citizen journalists to fill in the gaps in news coverage--by searching youtube videos and reading personal blogs.

Seeking out more individual stories/citizen journalism could help with one of my main beefs about mainstream media. Most news outlets are under such pressure to get stories out quickly, those stories end up developing on air or in print. So the facts seem to change from moment to moment, making the final version much less credible. Citizen journalism and individual stories seem like better ways to fill the need for immediate information. Since they're obviously and intentionally subjective, they don't need revision like factual news stories. People's own experiences and initial interpretations will still be valid regardless of the facts uncovered later.

So (long-winded, wandering) story short: I obviously need newspapers for the basic facts, but I think I'll try out this world of citizen journalism and individual stories to see if it fills the gaping hole left by mainstream media--particularly while waiting for regular news outlets to get their stories straight after major events.