Sun Rising on the News

It never helps to drive for more than a few minutes on an Interstate Highway in Iowa. I focus on keeping the car in my lane with the radio off. If my mobile device rings, I let it go to voicemail. When I look through the windshield at the landscape, it feels bad. It has been so long since the prairie was ripped up that people forget it once existed.

“More than 80% of Iowa was once covered in tallgrass prairie,” according to the Story County Conservation Center. “But over time as land use changed (we built cities, roads, agriculture fields, etc.) this critical habitat has diminished: Today, less than 0.1% of the original prairie remains.”

Iowa now has an extraction economy and the landscape shows it, even when the fields are green in July and August.

The ambient temperature averaged around 40 degrees on my trip home from Des Moines. That’s too warm for mid-January yet these are not normal days. There is scant snow on the ground, a harbinger of more drought to come. These conditions recur and appear to be the new normal. Desolate, dry, and barren are words I never thought to use to describe my home state. They fit.

So what is next in this place?

I have to figure out how to get news. I get a squinchy feeling every time I say I subscribe to the Washington Post, yet I need a national newspaper and every one of them has issues. Better the devil I know.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette announced the next in a series of cost savings efforts. They are reducing the number of printings they do to three per week. The online daily edition will continue for now. I read that over coffee before starting each day.

The local weekly paper, the Solon Economist, has about 600 current subscribers. I have not been impressed with its work since being purchased by the Daily Iowan a year ago. Among things that are missing is getting the newspaper posted online in a timely manner. Between Dec. 26 and Jan. 9, they did not post any of three expected editions online on publication day, until after I emailed the editor and asked what is up. My subscription will continue as long as they are in business.

I don’t watch television and infrequently turn the kitchen radio on. They will not be a major news source.

The internet has lots of stuff on it. The exodus of many newspaper reporters from their newspapers to Substack is having an effect on news coverage. There are too many Substacks, and not enough time to read all of them. They lean toward opinion, rather than news.

As far as social media goes, I’m keeping Facebook, Instagram and Threads. For now, Threads is where you will find most of my text posts. I cut back followed accounts on Facebook and Instagram where I don’t know the human behind them in real life. I’m also on BlueSky which has been a good place to read news-like stuff, yet it is not appealing as a place to find community. I spend too much time on social media and am actively working to reduce that.

Email has been and continues to be the best source of news. We don’t talk much about the role of email, and maybe we should. I spend as much time on email as I do on any single social media account. The time spent there rewards me with news.

It occurred to me, somewhere between Colfax and Williamsburg that I can’t delay the decision about how to get news. This will be a busy year as long as I find good health and economic security. News is the lifeblood of an engaged citizen. We must be picky about which outlets we use.