All The News That's Fit to Find

I’m a news junkie. The number of times I check cnn.com a day is downright obsessive. And I’m not particular. I’m intrigued by a political commentary just as much as a Paris Hilton expose. Local, Domestic, International – if its going on, I need to know about it.

New York City is home to all of the major news outlets in the country and news just seems to happen there first. There’s no escaping it. There are newspapers to purchase on every corner. Flashing billboards stream the news live in Times Square. Even if you wanted to avoid the news, you couldn’t, as street peddlers dispense free papers at the mouth of every subway station.

In New York, there’s actually time to absorb the news. Time can be found on a subway platform, in a cab stuck in traffic, on the Long Island Railroad or on a cross-town bus. For a city that moves as quickly as New York, there’s an awful lot of waiting going on, and that’s when the news comes in handy.

Here in Michigan, the news is filtered. We hear about the big stories: The President delivers the State of the Union tonight! Lindsay Lohan back in rehab! Redwings lose again! Great attention is paid to any structural or economic change by the Big Three (GM, Ford and Chrysler) and the networks nearly peed with glee when they reported on the man who fell asleep in a garbage can and awoke to find himself trapped in a city garbage truck. (I’m not making that up. He called on his cell phone from inside the truck, but he didn’t know which truck he was in, so all of the garbage trucks in the city had to pull over and go through their loads. But I digress…)

Smaller international and domestic stories seem to slip by without mention. The Detroit Free Press is a fine paper, but who has time to read it? Not me. I’m too busy scraping the ice and snow off my car every morning. I can’t wait till I get home, because at that point the news is cold.

Many people argue that they don’t like the news. Too much bad stuff going on in the world! Too depressing! They may be right, but in this day and age, its important to stay abreast of what’s happening.

Several months ago a small plane crashed into a residential building on the Upper East Side. I didn’t know about it for hours. Someone I worked with mentioned in passing: “Hey did you hear about the plane that crashed into the building in NY?” To say that I had fear stricken flashbacks would be an understatement. I ran to the TV and quickly learned the details. That’s when I realized I’m in a whole different world out here - one where the news doesn’t penetrate my daily routine. So I continue to check cnn.com obsessively. For me, not knowing what’s going on is scarier than anything I could ever read.