Strange Workings of the Probing Mind

Play "It's the Wine"
by Pattern Is Movement

Ever have the feeling you're on the cusp of a brilliant thought?

All around me, I've been looking for the trigger. So far, no luck. But here are some things that sprang to mind while reading:

The Telegraph of London posted a list of the 100 top living geniuses, as determined by 4,000 Britons who replied to an email from a global consulting firm called Creators Synectics.

Thoughts:

• Why can't I find a website about Creators Synectics?
• Who were the company's "six experts in creativity and innovation"?
• How were the 4,000 respondents chosen?
• Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, No. 19 on the list, are listed as publishers.
• No. 43 is Osama Bin Laden.

Speaking of lists, columnist Mark Morford at SFGate.com has proposed a Bliss Watch List, the polar opposite of the FBI's terrorist watch list.

Given how news tends to focus on the dark, the twisted, and the sensational, Morford's Bliss Watch List — and the subsequent reporting it would (theoretically) spawn — seems like an awesome proposal, even if it's meant to be ironic:

"The BWL will contain only the names of people widely suspected of being savvy, titillating, open-hearted, deeply lovable, sexed-up geniuses of divine intent and hot self-exploration and ravenous intellectual curiosity."

And speaking of news, the redesigned BusinessWeek magazine is running a story called "A Cautionary Tale for Old Media," about the San Jose Mercury News' attempt to get ahead of the game when news companies were just beginning to get online en masse.

Like so many attempts at revamping an industry after the rise of the Web, the story once again shows that not only do you need good ideas, you need tenacity, deep pockets, the right people — and the most uncontrollable quality of all — the right circumstances, in order to make a successful transformation.

The article clearly traces the Mercury News' demise, but the sum of the pattern I keep seeing doesn't appear until way down in the story:

"Looking back, (Mercury News' former executive editor Robert D. Ingle) concludes that what sank Knight Ridder was, surprisingly, that the Internet didn't change things fast enough. 'We got an early start, but we couldn't take advantage of it,' he says. 'People think the Internet business developed with lightning speed, but it took a long while. Only the newspaper companies with two-tier stock structures [not Knight Ridder] could support those businesses until they could stand on their own feet.'"

Questions:

• If traditional media companies continue to shrink, consolidate and partner, who or what will pay for what's produced? And how?

• If journalists are supposed to act as watchdogs, why are they doing it so badly? And who should readers trust instead when they don't have time to dig deep into things for themselves?

• We are all already reduced to relying on a few sources for most of our information. That seems pretty dangerous. So how do we broaden our knowledge of the world around us? (Not everyone has the luxury of travel, and people generally are becoming more physically isolated from each other.) And no, sharing information through social networks like Facebook is not the answer.

• People are producing a ton of information in the same ways (text, photos, video, podcasts/vodcasts, slideshows, games, searchable databases and maps). Frankly, there's only so much input a person can handle. But the form a story is told in isn't always the form people want it in. Sure, it's a judgment call, but should the reader — and the tool they're using to read the story — also help determine the form?