Here's your flash news antidote

Tuesday’s column took aim at flash news — that showy, sound-bite, emotionally evocative stuff that leaves the mind undernourished and uncomfortably overfull. Quantity over quality; pop-ups, scare-shares, and quick clicks that do nothing to enhance understanding.

Such “news” isn’t news so much as junk food, and if over-consumed, like sugar it can literally be toxic to the body.

It also dumbs us. A 2001 Canadian study found that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks and switches increase. Consuming information by distraction and interruption literally prevents understanding it.

Our minds need steady nourishment just like the rest of the body. Quality news, rather than flash news, must be selected as carefully as diet.

Contrary to impression, “real” news doesn’t take more time than the flashy variety. Not if you add up all the flash-news-clicks, the one-to-five minutes at a time spent on the other stuff and social media. Instead, spend the same total time on a daily paper or broader news features which actually explain.

Then see how you feel.

That’s the diet change that not only nourishes intellect but reduces fear. Which (as Tuesday’s column iterated) reduces aggression and extremism, fear’s (il)logical extensions. Which improves our relationships and decisions.

And just plain feels better.

Flash news also feeds the worst of all cognitive errors — confirmation bias. A seek-and-ye-shall-find mentality fed by skipping in-depth, skeptical analysis. Warren Buffett put it this way: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”

The most important stories don’t confirm what we already believe. They do have transformative effect. They may not look “sexy.” They take reporters time to develop, often starting with coverage of local governments and jobs, school boards and water quality, taxes and state laws that — once you get in the habit of following them — surprisingly become less “boring” because you see how much they and their decision-makers affect you. Those connections become more obvious, more real.

That creates better voters and shines a spotlight on leaders, highlighting the best while holding all accountable.

Local stories that change the way we live, work and govern connect us. News you can use requires you to think. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration takes more than 10 seconds to read a factoid before being interrupted by the next click, the bane of the shallow thinker.

Flash news grinds us down, makes us passive, because it tends to be news we can’t influence. Nothing to do, so do nothing — helplessness feeding upon itself.

But local news and investigative journalism — the bread and butter of daily newspapers and a core necessity of healthy democracy — do the opposite. This is reporting that informs us in areas relevant to our immediate lives. This is reporting that affects, even changes policies in the institutions that directly govern and serve.

These are the journalists who broke big national and international stories, the boots on the ground who both monitor and share information about public officials and agencies, helping us appreciate the job they do and identify the challenges, who provide the conduit to connect people who had no power alone, but manage to change things together.

And that’s the key distinction from flash news: In editorial content, this kind of sit-down-and-read-it, community-focused news includes looking for solutions as part of the process, rather than simply focusing on problems as we see in flash news.

A way to actually do something. Or see others doing something. That leaves us with a feeling of completion, of hope. Of connectedness.

This is the sort of news we can relate to: Things we can control or affect — things we can wrap our heads around. According to Columbia University research, 96 percent of America’s print news (under 50,000 circulation newspapers) is community-focused, relying on local relationships with advertisers and subscribers to exist — just like this one. Featuring and reporting on the same people and the same lives who consume it, and who share its home.

That’s empowering.

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Sholeh Patrick, J.D. is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Contact her at Sholeh@cdapress.com.