No news is good news?

Every morning, I go through the two large Twin Cities newspapers’ online editions. It’s a routine, an attempt to keep an eye on “the pulse” of the area in which I live. Almost every morning, I am disappointed by the vapidity (a new favorite word of mine) of “news”. I can see that the newspaper folks are working hard to present something of interest. Often it feels like they’re busting their butts to find anything that might be of interest. Today, both papers dutifully covered the astounding story that Best Buy is now going to sell musical instruments in some of their stores. Now there’s fodder for conversation!

“Hey, Henry, did you hear about Best Buy going into the music business?!”

If Henry hadn’t heard that news, I’m sure he’ll immediately drop whatever he was doing and hang on my subsequent comments. Yah, Shure, you betcha. But the news is so very often just that dull. As a result, the media latches on to “continuing sagas” that are even more bland, but that can appear to change slightly each day, such as the Bret Favre thingy (is it a scandal or nothing at all), or that Barack Obama and John McCain used to smoke (hold your breath) cigarettes and did they really quit or are they sneaking drags once in a while? Keep reading for more such intriguing revelations.

There are some stories I find of some interest… the human-interest stories, such as “Stillwater couple flying high with love of planes”, but even that paled when I found that the hubby of the couple worked for 36 years for 3M. Thirty-six years for the same company?! That put him in a class so alien to me that I had to stop reading.

There is a kind of story I would enjoy reading, and they’re all around us, and unending in variety. Every small business has a great story behind it… and it’s a story seldom well-told. We are surrounded by such small businesses, and, inevitably, the effort and grief involved in getting that business into operation is heroic in nature and a fine example of gritty determination. They are the stories of what made America great. Risk-takers, entrepreneurs, gamblers, spending long, long hours doing the needed pure grunt work to get a business afloat, and then to keep it afloat. Newspapers cover business “success stories”… the local business that grew and is now national or international, but they don’t cover the thousands of small businesses that stay small because that is what they choose to be. One-man operations, family businesses, or a couple of people working together to make something from almost nothing by risking both their efforts and their money… that’s a story worthy of the front page.