Editor’s Note
Back in the old days — that’s less than a decade and before there were such things as blogs and interactive conversations with readers — editors used to respond to their newspaper readers with an “editor’s note.” Sometimes it clarified a point made in a letter to the editor. Sometimes it offered a correction. Sometimes it was just a simple explanation. An editor’s note was a handful of sentences; maybe a four or five paragraphs. It was always a personal link between the editor and the reader. Only difference between it and today’s blog is the immediacy and the platform. Welcome to Editor’s Note.

Archive for March 9th, 2009

The “sage of Omaha” gets it right

Add comment March 9th, 2009

If you need a roadmap for managing the current economy, here’s a sane, sensible one with the smarts of Warren Buffett. Good reading, most excellent advice and worthy of a deep, relaxing breath.

“Everything will be all right. We do have the greatest economic machine that man has ever created.”

The real differences between1981-82 and today

Add comment March 9th, 2009

I just hate it when folks blame “The Media” for bad news. Like it’s our fault that the economy is in free fall. Geesh, we didn’t get those big bonuses or package up those toxic mortgages. We paid our bills and funded our 401ks like the rest of you.

We’re just reporting the news, the facts, context and impact, of a global economy in search of a bottom. Just like we’ll report the bottom and the eventual rise from the ashes. That’s what we do.

But, maybe it is our fault, at least sort of, that we’re all scared out of our proverbial shorts. There are two whoppers of a difference between today’s and all the other recessions/depressions: 24/7 cable television news and the Internet.

A newspaper is a once-a-day fix, so one gets the bad news once a day and then has the remaining 23 hours to go do normal stuff. With the 24/7 news cycles on television and the Web, it’s easy to get sucked into following every tick of the stock market, every repeated-ad-naseum headline, and every worried-and-over-the-top-for-TV-guesstimate-turned-analysis interview.

Yep, it’s bad out there. Yep, it’s likely to get worse. Yep, I worry, sometimes a lot, about what’s going to happen at home, with my son, with my job, here in the News Tower. But, I find that when I create an “information overload-free zone” I remember what the important things are. And, I can get back to work and back to living.

So, maybe the real folks are right this time. We’re opening ourselves to too much information. We need a daily dose (the newspaper), or maybe a couple (say, a morning, noon and night check of the Web and TV). We don’t need 24/7.

As the pop culture cliche would put it: TMI…..