Back to the Future
In the Tribune newsroom, he hopes. “This means turning a small part of the Tribune into a very aggressive newswriting and gathering operation,” he says. “For the most part, it’s not going to affect how people do their jobs as journalists here. The diligence and expertise remain where the Tribune’s value is, and that you can’t get in the way of. But it will speed up immensely the idea of how quickly you have to get the news out. That hierarchy process–where you make a decision late in the afternoon and evening about what’s going on in the paper–this does away with it. You make decisions immediately. People on the Internet are generally not going to be reading long stories about anything. You can link to longer stories, illustrate with other stories, whatever you need to do. But the writing has to be severely compressed–as you wrote for the radio wire–and have personality but be informative at the same time. The idea behind this is very old-fashioned. The values behind this are very old-fashioned. What’s new is that now it’s on a computer.”
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“There could be bells,” he says. “There are a lot of things you could do, and what’s going to happen will be dictated by your interest in news. Some people will not want to be completely awash in news–and there will be versions for them. But we’ve got to compete with everybody. As for revenues–it’s not in my pay grade to worry about that.”
“They don’t say that in Kansas,” he said. In Kansas the board of education knocked evolution down a peg and urged teachers to add ID to the curriculum. “When I was a kid,” he went on, “my wildest dream was a comic book where Superman and Batman–joined by Robin, the Boy Wonder–fought crime together. Intelligent design is almost the same thing. When you think of everything that faith accomplished in the first millennium and everything rationalism accomplished in the second, imagine what they could do if they teamed up in the third.” He concluded with great force: “Kansas is a state that dares to dream those dreams.”
Intelligent designers, he explained, are merely saying that the world as we know it is no accident. As an illustration, he said he’d never understood why people don’t all speak the same language even though monkeys speak the same language. Then he realized someone must have stepped in and gummed up the works.
And war?
