Teaching your kids to be dinosaurs

Waiting for the bus my daughters and I read the papers. When we can afford it we revel in the New York Times. (A friendly delivery man knows we like the Globe too and drops us one when he has a spare.) Lately, though, it's just the incredible shrinking Hartford Courant - our state's capitol city paper, emerging from rounds and rounds of buyouts and sales and layoffs.

Reading the entire paper in 10 minutes has its advantages, I guess...fewer to take to the curb. Less put into landfills. But half the front section seems like police report transcripts. Be afraid, it seems to intone - be very afraid. We talk about that: what's reported, how it's easier to copy a police report than to analyze complex records and events, how the paper we hold in our hand represents something that is not proportional to reality.

So you see my kids have a steady diet of news. And commentary about news.

Maybe I am teaching my kids to be dinosaurs.

Cooking dinner recently, one of my daughters stated a nearby town is poorer than ours. Really? I queried. Yes, I've been there, came the confident reply. So I explained different ways to measure community wealth and resources. They quickly grasped the notion of a Grand List, adding up all the taxable property and dividing by the number of people. We have a house, we have a car; they could relate.

Later, I thought ruefully that of course my clever middle school children could grasp the basic elements of a municipal budget, drilled into me as a 21-year-old reporter covering a town. But there are fewer and fewer people know how to report on these things, or opportunities to read about them.

Recently I was in a panel discussion reflecting on whether our current state of media - massive corporate ownership, diminishing reporting and investigative resources - is a chicken or an egg problem. Or has a chicken or egg solution. Do we as a society expect and seem to like such shallow reporting because that's all we get? Is that what we get because that is what over time we have shown we want? Is that what we want because it's all we know? Or all we have time for?

I remember feeling from my own reporting days that I was often just writing into a well. You work your ass off, break a fabulous story, and no one cares or acts on it and nothing changes. That's a good part of why I left journalism, and now, after a lot of years of trying in other ways to change the world, I can see how even the best reporting got to be part of a much larger and more concerted campaign. You need the analysis, and the content in that 30+ inches of unbroken copy, but you've also got to call out the important parts and hit people over the head with it. Again and again and again.

There are actually some good things about the incredible shrinking Courant. I do see they are calling out information in new and visually appealing ways. Good! What's still lacking, though, is analysis, and any context. How about a police blotter that also tells us whether crime - by any measure! - was up or down or the same as in recent weeks and years.

Maybe this is one of those things that will work itself out with time. Perhaps the upsurge in blogs and online news will fill the gap - although I am afraid I agree with those who point out that online communities too often consist of people who agree with each other or are interested in narrow and specific topics (left-handed dentists, Buddhist parents.) They're not learning about things in their own community and they are not talking to anyone with a different opinion.

I cling to the notion that as an informed citizens we should have a grasp of certain facts and processes and benchmarks. What's our tax rate, how do we compare to other places, how are we educating our kids and taking care of our seniors, and so many more. And I haven't found a better place we should be able to look to for that than our media.