Thread:Comments:University of Chicago's Mansueto Library suffers power outage/Comments from feedback form - "Is this article really newswor..."/reply (3)

I admit that it has an element of "Small-earthquake-in-China-no-one-hurt" and I probably would not have passed it if I had been the editor. In fact the only reason I did read it was that I was curious to see what it contained that justified its inclusion. Answer: nothing really -- it is reminiscent of much of the news on TV, where not only is everything that any celeb does covered as news, but so is the sight of the gate where an associated vehicle might or might not appear some time soonish, that might or might not be carrying the celeb.

So who are we to be picky?

OK, I suggest that we work a bit on the yawn factor, but OTOH, an aspect of this story does give me cold chills; I am increasingly worried about how infrastructurally dependent we have become. It not only shows how helpless we are every time a lift (elevator for the trans-Atlantics) gets stuck, or a train loses signal power, but every time a nuclear power station loses coolant. The things we take for granted are hair raising. A correspondent told of how a girl colleague when Titanic was located on the sea floor, asked why people hadn't sent out Boeings to rescue the passengers and crew (well, just the technical aspects of that one are a bit gob-smacking, but...) He pointed out to her that this had happened in 1912. She says: "So?"

Now, that was an apparently expensively-educated first-world young adult. What sort of news items was she equipped to understand at all? I wonder how many people in that library had a clue about what was going on, how power could fail, or why, or how many aspects of the library's operation were designed to deal with such minor factors.

Which amounts to how much more than nothing, in terms of newsworthiness? That is arguable, but it is a pretty poor news consumer who cannot take the trouble to get something out of whatever he has invested reading time in. Such as this comment for example.