Last Updated: May 26, 1999
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A perspective on online news
Serendipity lost when news is filtered for you
Think of the stories that you’ve read recently that
an Internet news filter would have never let through; that’s the weakness
of online news now
By Dennis Hetzel
When I speak to community groups, a common question involves what I
think the Internet will mean to newspapers.
The Internet offers plenty of exciting, positive possibilities for serving
the public. My biggest concern can be summed up in one word.
Serendipity
Says my dictionary: The word was coined around 1754 by Horace Walpole
from the story, "The Three Princes of Serendip." It means the luck or good
fortune to discover something by accident that turns out to be meaningful
for you.
Newspapers deal a lot in serendipity.
Recently, for example, serendipity meant nuclear reactors in the Congo.
As I munched on a deli sub, I read the main news section of The Philadelphia
Inquirer. On the front page was this headline: "A derelict reactor echoes
Congo’s lost energy."
The African nation is so broke, it can no longer operate a research
reactor at the University of Kinshasa. (Professors make $20 a month and
were last paid in December.) During the civil war, officials feared a rebel
rocket would hit the reactor, causing a radiation leak.
For me, the story was much more than an article about nuclear power
in Africa. This one problem was symbolic of the mind-boggling task faced
by the Congo’s new leaders as they try to restore a semblance of stability
and economic growth. It makes our problems in America seem pretty tame
and quite solvable.
In my paper that same week, serendipity was a story about staph infections,
of all things.
The story said that viruses are becoming increasingly immune to antibiotics.
Scientists have now found a strain of staph that is nearly untreatable.
Serendipity gets your mind working. Mine went like this:
I recalled how my father-in-law almost died a year ago when he fought
a strain of pneumonia that doctors couldn’t treat. They told the family
much the same thing. Some "bugs" are getting harder and harder to fight.
Probably there are such stories in many of your families.
Serendipity was on the front page in the next day’s paper when I learned
about a man who I never knew existed. He is Louis Frank, a University of
Iowa physicist who had suffered derision from his colleagues for more than
a decade.
Frank theorized that comet-like snowballs have been raining down on
Earth at the rate of 16 million a year. These small comets contain enough
water to fill the oceans over 4 billion years of our planet’s history.
They might be the stuff of life itself.
Recently, Frank offered new evidence and scientists are taking him quite
seriously now.
Serendipity also was learning about a teen-ager in a nearby town, Hanover,
who has composed music on a computer that was played at her graduation
ceremony.
Serendipity was a story in my newspaper about York Suburban High School
students who are teaching assistants at Valley View Elementary School.
"It’s been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever seen in teaching," said teacher
Connie Fickes.
These are things mass media can do best: directing your attention to
fresh topics or finding ways to engage your interest about important matters
that would otherwise be dull.
By contrast, the Internet is evolving in ways where the user defines
what she or he wants information about. New software seeks out articles
on the topics you’ve selected and electronically "pushes" the material
to you.
I use one of those programs myself. My pre-selected topics include "newspapers"
and "Chicago Bears," a couple things that spark passionate interest on
my part.
Here are some topics that wouldn’t have occurred to me to include on
my list:
Staph infections.
Louis Frank.
Physics.
Congo.
Valley View Elementary School.
Hanover music.
Nor would I design a list of interests that includes the auditor general’s
office of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Robert Casey Jr., the new auditor general, would laugh and agree with
that.
Yet, as he talked to our editorial board recently, he got my attention
with his enthusiasm for how his office could better serve school districts
by finding new ways to analyze and explain how districts use the resources
they have available.
"It’s like looking in a mirror you’ve never looked into," he said.
That’s a great description of serendipity, too. We lose a lot as a society
if we don’t think this is important.
Hetzel is editor and publisher of the York (Pa.) Daily Record. E-mail
him at editor@ydr.com.
