What just happened? I mean, like, yesterday? Or even earlier this morning?
Some of us really want to know.
Some of us couldn’t care less.
According to the Daily Post archives, something vaguely newsworthy took place back in 2004. A group of eight friends met in a secluded dining room to discuss the creation of a “news and commentary” website focused on a small town in southern Colorado. They didn’t have a name for the website, but one of the friends suggested “Pagosa Daily Post”.
Another friend came up with a tagline: “Fresh News, Fresh Views”.
“Fresh” having, I imagine, one intended meaning:
1. Recently made, produced, or harvested; not stale or spoiled.
“Fresh” also had other, unintended meanings, which became evident as the first few issues were published:
2. Lacking experience.
3. Marked by cocky boldness or disregard of others.
All three meanings should have been applied to the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004. And still should.
But that’s old news. And old news is good news, in my humble opinion.
For most of human history, ‘news’ did not exist… at least, not in the sense implied by a motto like “Fresh News, Fresh Views”. Back in prehistoric times, if something happened out of the ordinary, people noticed it and maybe said to the person standing beside them: “Well, that was out of the ordinary, don’t you think?” But mostly, life was thoroughly ordinary and not worth remarking about.
No one had paper to print on, so if you wanted to document something, you had to chisel it into a nearby rock, using a slightly harder piece of rock. By the time you were done chiseling, you probably forgot what you were trying to document in the first place.
At any rate, the story was no longer ‘news’ by the time you got done. Which was just as well, because people didn’t want ‘news’ back in those days. They wanted timeless stories about gods and supernatural creatures and heroes performing extraordinary feats of strength.
This was partly because politics hadn’t been invented yet. No one went around stealing elections in those days. They might steal your wife, but that was expected and not out of the ordinary. It certainly wasn’t ‘news’.
Something that might be called ‘news’ arose in ancient Egypt, when the Pharaohs sent out couriers to remind the people in the remote villages about paying their taxes, and also to explain what would happen to them if they didn’t pay their taxes. (You don’t want to know.)
Turns out, it was the Chinese who invented ‘newspapers’ starting back around 700 BC. (They also invented gunpowder, but that came much later.) Reports gathered by officials were compiled — reportedly, by a guy named Confucius — as the Spring and Autumn Annals, which were available to a sizeable reading public and dealt with common news themes, though they straddled the line between ‘news’ and ‘history’.
That’s a line that I also like to straddle, obviously.
Something that may have happened just yesterday — especially if it were something naughty, or at least out of the ordinary — can sell newspapers. Or, if you are broadcasting news on TV, it can sell soap, or cars, or cell phone services. (Soap, cars, and cell phones being the core elements of modern life.)
For me, what happened in 700 BC in China is equally interesting, and not nearly as threatening.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.