The Boomer Chronicles

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Short Communications Can’t Express Human Suffering Posted: 31 Mar 2011 08:13 AM PDT I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday about the crisis in Japan and she said she was upset at how the media was spending so much time talking about the science (radiation) and the economy and not the people affected. And I said, but I've read stories in various media (Time magazine, the New York Times, Boston Globe, etc.) about what's happening to individuals in Japan. Then I realized something. For the millions of people who have given up reading newspapers and other print publications and rely solely on online media or social media, they will be exposed almost exclusively just to headlines and brief, factual stories, but never to what we journalists used to call "human interest” stories. Human interest stories are the kind where you get a feeling for where the person is, what they are wearing, if they look out the window as they recount their sad tale, if the factory where they are working is so noisy she has to shout, and so on. You can't express a human interest story in a tweet or a few sentences. These stories, by their very nature, need to be expansive. Maybe this is something everyone has already figured out, but it is just occurring to me. This is a terrible loss.

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