Just Reading the Paper

This is to thank all of the journalists, reporters, newspaper columnists and editors who have applied critical thinking to subjects that I cannot see from my daily position in this world, but want to know about. I appreciate your contribution for how it has made me feel at ease, at home with the practice of challenging ideas.

I have a vivid memory of when I realized this: Someome on the radio said something while I was just lightly paying attention to the story. The commemt slipped an argument I would normally disagree with below my radar, and it got past my front-line defenses, it got past the the cognitive frames and constructs that define my usual positions. I started thinking about this unwelcome, uninvited argument from the speaker’s perspective. I completely bought into it. I started seeing past experiences that could’ve brought the speaker to their beliefs. I started seeing how their cognitive frames sealed and secured their worldview.

I am better off for having slogged through the battlefields where ideas, ideologies, and styles compete.

Now, I play a new game as I get to know other people. The game: A way to think through problems the way my partner in conversation would. I try to see how they got to their positions, opinions, or conclusions. Sometimes I find that the ends of those paths are familiar – a place I know of, a person I know, a character I’ve seen. After evaluating another’s perspective more thoroughly, I have a more complete understanding of their world-view. Often times, I am won-over to a perspective that is altogether new to me. Rarely do I become entrenched, because in the long run, I spend more time challenging their world-view and mine.

I enjoy the fruits of your labor every day when I listen to the radio, or when I read newspaper articles. If it harmed you that I didn’t pay for your work I consumed, I apologize. I love the idea of a reporter as one who digs to reveal. It’s romantic. But, the investigative reporter is a stronger kind of energy. A tension to open criticism to the public. A daring and bravery for being in the practice of analyzing and critiquing the politics and regularity every day.

I hope I get to see your profession bond with other parts of our lives, our markets, our economies to focus even more by grafting onto or being inside those entities. I have a dream that as newspapers – or, even the formal news outlets – deconstruct and dissolve the reporters take their trade into organizations as investigators on the inside. I dream and hope that investigative reporters develop a function akin to what user experience (UX) does: To analyze, criticize, improve upon how companies communicate within and without, how companies behave, how companies plan and develop.

Happily challenged and educated by your work,
Jay