• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, September 2, 2004

In a story on Irwin Gratz (a Maine Public Radio personality) becoming the next president of the National Society of Professional Journalists, Mark Jurkowitz, the media writer for The Boston Globe, was quoted as saying that Americans have fewer and fewer shared truths. Said Jurkowitz, "People are starting to cherry-pick their news media to match their view of the world."

And the media industry is helping (in an attempt to compensate for the audience erosion of mass-reach vehicles like network TV and magazines) by launching niche channels and periodicals that appeal to the worldview's of smaller and smaller groups. This, of course, on top of the explosive proliferation of blogs featuring worldviews that are unique down to the individual.

All of which makes us ponder how the same story might be reported by each niche property. Here is how the Associated Press, perhaps the gold standard of traditional mass news, reported one story:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Forget finding an Internet cafe. For less than what it costs to build a small library, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot.

The same story reported from other worldviews:

Duke University's Library Magazine : The cradle of democracy may turn out to be the graveyard for knowledge if Philadelphia city officials implement a plan to use funds equal to building a small library for.....

Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg: "I asked Katie to go to Philadelphia's Union Station and try to find a hot spot, but uncharacteristically she refused, asking why I got to go to Paris, Rome, and Athens while she gets the trips to Newark, Detroit, and Philadelphia..."

Washington Monthly: A six month investigation by Jason DeParle has uncovered that numerous Philadelphia city officials were guests of Linksys at an exclusive South Pacific spa just months before announcing that the city plans to turn all 135 square miles....

Aljazeera.net: In attempt to disguise its new CIA-funded technology to capture private citizen keystrokes from thin air, flunkies of the imperialist Bush regime today announced that the sixth largest city in the Land of Satan will..."

Planetout.com: Turning to technology news, we see that Philadelphia...oh my GOD wasn't Tom Hanks just fabulous in that movie? He was soooo tragic not in the Susan Hayward kind of way, but more like the Bette Davis "Now, Voyager," kind of way...

BuzzMachine by Jeff Jarvis: It's utterly unsurprising to me that Philadelphia beat out New York and San Francisco to network itself with WiFi. I have a cousin who lives in Philly and he's a very progressive guy. Don't start whining about "disruptive technology." This is perfectly predictable. If you want to bill yourself as the city of Brotherly Love, you MUST provide the means for brothers to connect and exercise that love. Fair enough. But let me be very clear I am not using brothers in the racial sense nor love in the erotic sense, but rather...

AFLCIO.org: Although Philadelphia will promote an increase in productivity to justify spending city funds on a wireless network instead of sanitation worker benefits, it is a known fact that workers are not benefiting from their greater productivity. According to an EPI analysis of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics productivity figures, productivity has increased 11.1 percent since the fourth quarter of 2001, but workers' compensation (wages and benefits) has increased at just 3.4 percent, less than one-third the productivity growth rate....

IM Traffic:

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