This column isn’t about my son, although it’s tempting to make it so.
That he and I share the same first and last names — and that I once wrote for the same local newspaper that currently employs him as a staff reporter — confuses many. But local journalism is a very different experience for my son than it was for me 30 years ago.
Our newsroom staff easily was twice the size of that newspaper’s current staff. We always worked out of the newsroom, going out into the field to report and then returning to write our stories.
When we did write and submit stories remotely, we did so on little portable “computers” that had a whopping 32 kb of memory and two-inch-deep screens upon which we could see eight lines of copy at a time.
In this pandemic-induced remote-work world, my son’s “newsroom” is his home office, where he has more computing power than we ever did. The biggest difference, though, is that we didn’t have to deal with social media. For him, it’s a constant focus.
This all came to mind this past week after talking with my son about his experiences on the day that the remnants of Hurricane Ida came pouring through the Alleghenies.
“It was like I was seeing that the world was green, the authorities were telling me the world was green, but everyone else was saying the world was red,” recalled David in our phone conversation.
There’s no question that our section of the Alleghenies came close to disaster on Sept. 1. The panic that resulted, however, was due more to a flood...
Read Full Story: https://www.dailyamerican.com/story/opinion/2021/09/09/turn-off-social-media-pay-attention-local-media/5711993001/
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