COLUMN: Finding news that's newsworthy

We all have a romantic vision of the heart-stopping, day-to-day drama of a newspaper's or magazine's existence: The newsroom is buzzing with signs of life. Reporters are hunched over their notepads, feverishly scribbling down that all-important quote before they get set to bang out copy into the typewriter. An anguished editor rushes into the printing room holding a breaking front-page story and calls out, "Stop the presses!" But those scenes may just be too romantic to be true. If you look more closely, the reporters, editors and presses belong to another era where the lighting flickers, people wear suspenders and you hear the dings and clacks of a typewriter instead of the whir of a computer. And everything's in black and white. If you try to bring that image up to date -- from the 1940s to the 1990s, let's say -- it just doesn't work. Adding color, modernizing people's clothing and upgrading the technology fall short. Why, in people's minds, have newspapers and news magazines become antiquated like that, even when they're still a part of life? The New York Times still gets churned out every day. Time and Newsweek are as integral to a newsstand as its vendor. Maybe we associate news with another time. Much of the 1990s fluff news has flaunted the very definition of news. In an audacious move, Time -- not Rolling Stone or People -- recently flashed the female singer Jewel's face on its cover. And Newsweek, for a story about the rise in cigar smoking, put entertainer and Playboy centerfold Jenny McCarthy on its cover last week. Even the Times, with its supposedly stringent standards for news, isn't immune to the madness. The Kennedy family's "new legacy" was a front-page news story earlier this month. This is the 90s kind of news. But once upon a time, there was real news. Headlines came at you with the force of a battering ram: "HITLER INVADES FRANCE," "U.S. BOMBS HIROSHIMA," "MARTIN LUTHER KING SHOT" and "SAIGON FALLS" were all real stories. Those were real times, full of war and death and change. Now the only change is in the half-percentage point Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan might raise interest rates. We're basking in the sunny glow of world hegemony, communism conquered, political parties embracing and nations united under the universal desire for a Big Mac. Our only emotional tumult is reserved for, as a recent article in The New Yorker put it, "sympathy for the armies of editors and producers who [have] to wring news out what seems to be turning into an embarrassingly newsless society." But is there really no news out there except for Jenny McCarthy and company? Or are we, ensconced in the comfort of newslessness, eager to avoid it? After all, why would we want to worry about real issues when we can worry about whether the new generation of Kennedys is carrying on the family legacy? News is not a given. It's a choice, and we can choose to send those reporters out to scribble it down. Or we can choose to retire it to a black-and white-photo in the back pages of our memory.