Boomer News

Do older Boomers still read the newspapers?

I’m one generation older than the oldest Baby Boomer.  Do you older Boomers still like reading the daily newspaper over coffee in the morning and relax on Sunday with all the information in the thick Sunday paper? The “Tablet” is the latest electronic digital device designed to put an end to the newspaper business.

I’ve been advocating a dedicated TV channel to put words to the graphics that track the worlds most serious problems on a daily basis for 35 years now. That concept has not caught hold yet. Poor Ross Perot tried to get interest in the use of graphs in the 1992 election campaign and again in the 2008 campaign when he initiated www.perotcharts.com web site. Apparently he gave up … the web site doesn’t seem to be active any more.

I know people use the Internet for all the financial data, graphs & charts … but the older generation will still want the full page printed sheet the newspapers provide. The concept of putting words to graphics can be done at a local, state, national and global levels in the newspapers.

Journalist & politicians are for the most part verbal people. Graphs are foreign to them … “graphs are for people who are into math and science.” Journalist have learned photo journalism … putting words to pictures.  They don’t seem to appreciate the power graphics have to convey the present status and future projected status of all the important  issues of the day. A graph can be worth a thousand words. Graphs can help reduce “The Too Much Information Problem”

Hillary Clinton made fun of Ross Perot’s charts in the 2008 campaign. Duh! Charts on the debt have been crying out for action for decades and yet the politicians have not had the fortitude to address the problem. With the Internet, the American public now have access to the information that shows how soon the crisis is going to hit us. The Massachusetts election shows how the American public is awakening to the unsustainable curves the graphs are showing. The politicians & TV news media are feeling the heat of the public anger … and party affiliation has nothing to do with with the overall frustration in our governments ineptitude with problems they have avoided for years.

We need a dedicated TV channel that profides projections on every important issue, in the same style as the weather channel. The same graphs and statistics can be printed in the newspapers to breath new life into newspaper business.