The Most Important News of Your Life in Less Than a Minute

I started thinking about this piece about 20 plus years ago. It was then that I began to notice that people's attention spans were getting shorter. I reached this conclusion by observing the popularity of the entertainment magazine shows on television, the slow but steady rise of USA Today as a news source in a time when newspapers were just beginning to feel pain of shrinking circulation and the emergence of CNN and the CNN Headline News service. Suddenly, news was available whenever one wanted it. I was traveling a lot in those days and it was most convenient to tune in CNN as soon as I arrived at a hotel in a new city. In 15 minutes, I knew all the pertinent things I needed to know to continue to appear to be a citizen of the world.

However, after growing up listening to long radio newscasts during the dinner hour which then gave way to long television newscasts during the dinner half hour (everything was shrinking), I began wondering why and how these start ups with their concise information capsules and, in the case of USA Today, the little charts that summed up some important issue could be as satisfying as the long form information I was accustomed to receiving. Very few of us thought "McNews" as it was called, would survive.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that the generation that was about to take over the bulge in the population grew up on Sesame Street. You know, "Today's show is brought to you by the letter g, the color green and the number 4, boys and girls." So, if these kids were getting their information spoon fed to them in nice little mind sized easily absorbed chunks, how were they going to react to large mind numbing chunks of data that might require some sort of smack in the forehead to effectuate a kind of Heimlich Mind Maneuver to free a choking brain? Come to think of it, the music of the time had the same rhythm structure that nursery rhymes had. They were short, easy to learn and they rhymed. Just like the music, the news and information had a pleasant and easy to follow cadence. Sound effects were added to the newscasts to set it apart from the music. A Pavlovian teletype ticker separated the news from every other sound on the air. Even the voices of the news announcers had a certain timbre to them to further alert the audience to the fact that what they were listening to was the news. Maybe it wasn't the glass ceiling, sexism or lack of opportunity that banned the women from the on air news business for so long, but rather the culprit was their higher pitched voices being thought to be "unnews like." Women have been delivering news (good, bad and humorous) in their homes for years and everyone who heard these reports, understood them.

So, what's the point of this? The newspapers continue to fall like houses of ....well...wet newsprint. News has all but disappeared from many radio stations and television stations have added more news in hopes of staving off their declining viewership caused by the proliferation and fractionalization of cable and maybe the hope that without newspapers, they'll get another chance at regaining their once huge audiences. Video Rangers, that train has sailed.

The recent election in Iran where the government banned "traditional" news coverage, came right into our ears and eyes from the Internet, cell phones, Face Book and Twitter with its 140 character limit on content. It is a hoot to hear these news folks with their basso profundo voices explaining their information sources in terms of "tweets." The rabbit hole has been enlarged, Alice and we're all falling through it.