News is Like Making Pizza, Have It Your Way!

Jarvis shares similar views about stories and news with Sullivan. Both writers hold that the news is a constantly evolving process. Sullivan illustrates this especially well in his article, “Why I Blog.” He narrates how he interacts with his readers after he has published a post and he even rewrites his posts if he receives new and pertinent information about the topic. Eventually, he takes what he has gathered from his blog and converts it into a newspaper column. “Readers tell me of breaking stories, new perspectives, and counterarguments to prevailing assumptions….Each week, after a few hundred posts, I also write an actual newspaper column.” In other words, the story does not end with the first publication. Jarvis illustrates this idea using diagrams and even a timeline of the life of a news story. The process starts with an event or an idea and evolves from questions, interviews, and research to become the actual written piece which yields comments, corrections, or even a follow-up story.
Chris Hedges in his article “Bad Days for Newsrooms and Democracy” remarks nostalgically that newspapers once served as a window to the world for ordinary Americans. “Newspapers, when well run, are a public trust….They keep citizens engaged with their cultural, civic, and political life….Most of this is vanishing or has vanished.” Jarvis also writes about “The Way It Was,” accompanied by another diagram. Unlike Hedges, Jarvis does not seem to think that this change from the way it was is necessarily a bad thing. But it does mean that newsrooms will have to adjust somehow to ‘the way it is now,’ what he calls the ‘press sphere,’ a world that revolves around the reader instead of the writer.