Today's Big News May Not Be So Obvious   

Journalists will have to know more to do the job.

Has news ended? Here's the argument, mainly from people who were around to report big events of the past, or at least to experience them.

Nothing is happening now, they say. Think about those big stories of the century.

There was the Depression: inescapable news on all fronts, with every kind of story, from Dust-Bowl migrations to ruined investors leaping from New York skyscrapers.

Then World War II. It was everywhere, in one form or another. People wanted to know exactly where Corregidor and Iwo Jima were. Now they see no reason to know where Beijing is.

The Cold War, of course, was an even longer-running story, with news unavoidable every day. People may not have known what the capital of Kentucky was, but they knew what the KGB did, and they wanted to know all about what was in those silos in Nebraska.

Space seemed a bigger story when there was a race to land on the moon, and truly big when humans went there and came back. Actually, more important news probably is coming in now from unmanned space probes much farther afield, but the earlier elements of drama are missing.

The collapse of the Evil Empire was a great story to end the Cold War story. The visuals were unexpectedly good: people breaking chunks off the Berlin Wall, Boris Yeltsin standing defiantly on a tank and Red Army troops firing shells into the Russian Parliament building.

So those were the days. Real news. Somehow this perception coincides neatly with the career spans of those who were there. But they have a point, if you think of news as being essentially unmistakable, obvious, unavoidable.

Of course, some of the biggest news of all time didn't fit those descriptions. Or was it really news, since it was not reported in timely fashion? (If a new falls in the forest and no one is there to scoop it, is it a new?) The story of the fall of the Soviet Union was missed as long as it was only a loud crumbling noise, and then it was reported as a great surprise.

Unmistakable, obvious, unavoidable: We should not include those words in our definitions of news. News is harder than that.

Even without worldwide conflagrations, economic desolation and history's greatest morality play to anchor the news for us, there is still big news. We may not be very well prepared to report it. Journalists will need to know more to do their jobs in the future.

Reporters and editors may still have the hang of politics and government and certainly the yen for covering the textures of lifestyles, but they remain largely ignorant when it comes to the sciences, for instance, where many of the news frontiers are to be found.

I've just read a little book called "Longitude," by Dava Sobel. It tells how John Harrison, a clockmaker, solved a great scientific mystery of the 17th and 18th centuries: how to accurately determine longitude, and therefore location. His discovery almost overnight made the world smaller, accelerating exploration, multiplying navies, spreading the British empire.

It didn't make much news, just history. It's the kind of news we need to work harder to get.