25 march — 07 april 2009

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27 october – 10 november 200910

mind’s eye

This November marks the release of 2012, a Roland Emmerich movie seeking to capitalize on our decade's hysteria du jour and general unease. Originally slated for July release, it was quietly pushed back to a timeslot thought to be more favor-able. 2012 seems to embrace all of the cliché cheesiness that has characterized its director’s career. The trailer features a nearly incomprehensible series of calamitous events world-wide, with seemingly no central theme or purpose rather than “blowing stuff up real good.” It’s the ultimate culmina-tion of Hollywood's years spent driving home the fact that cobbling together random scenes of improbably-scaled cin-ematic carnage will amount to box office revenue.

On some level this movie is likely just (relevant cultural anxiety) + too many special effects to comprehend.On the other side of the coin is the fact that the Dec. 21, 2012, hysteria is real. It’s at least real enough to have gained the at-tention of the portion of the non-tinfoil-hat public. Wrapped up in this myth is a whole menagerie of misconception, wish-ful thinking and desperate escapism. Central to all theories is the concept that the Mayan “long count” - a calendar devoted to extrapolating celestial events in the long-term, is thought to mysteriously end on the Northern Hemisphere's Winter Solstice of 2012. Theories are then cut with standard doses of Nostradamus, lizard people, the so-called New World Order - the usual suspects - and an internet-born cultural meme slowly comes about.

The movie trailer suggests the film runs the gamut on 2012 theories, but it's safe to say that it cannot possibly cover it from all angles. These “theories” are often prefaced with “RE: RE: RE: RE: FWD: U GOTA RED THIS. SCARY STUF :O!”, as is the custom in scholarly journals. These writings then stumble through a melting pot of modern fringe paranoia, but usually involve a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles, the collision of a mysterious “Planet X” (also called Nibiru, from Babylonian

by John oen

rachel mosey

11www.wakemag.org

mind’s eye

mythology), a “galactic alignment,” and various permutations and paranoia revolving around human activities (particularly the currently-broken Large Hadron Collider).

These may appear to center around one central catastrophe unless one takes the time to examine the revolving-door na-ture of doomsday predictions. For its part, the movie seems to include massive and impossible flooding, asteroid impacts, the literal collapse and disintegration of California along the San Andreas faultline, and what appears to be enormous tsu-namis cresting the Himalayas. That all of these images can be crammed into one two-and-a-half minute trailer is astonish-ing in its own right, but this fact also suggests that the movie was storyboarded with a grab-bag of pseudoscience.

The prevalence of film featuring disaster for disaster’s sake cannot be solely attributed to the proliferation of cheap, read-ily available special effects. The past 30 years have seen an unprecedented wealth distribution upward in Western soci-ety, and the prominence and breadth of doomsday theories may reflect a popular disconnect. Even in cases where there is an ounce of truth, embellishment and oh-so-convenient linkage is unfathomably common since the advent of the in-ternet, and there is a slippery slope in theory-crafting that may very well achieve critical mass with the release of 2012.

From this perspective, 2012 and its predecessors are a tragic reflection of the idly destructive fantasies of a public with, by some accounts, less free time than at any point since feudal-ism, and even less willingness to chalk their plight up to the random machinations that drive modern commerce. For the workaday public, “Science” is cryptic and cumbersome, and is not nearly as fulfilling as the mad-lib media daydreams that characterize so much of downtime in the West. Our “news” is tailored to entertain and exaggerate, and it should be no sur-prise that popular science has become a loosely-interpreted spectre of failed high school curriculums’ past.

The most astonishing aspect of the 2012 hysteria, however, is that like most doomsday theories, it stems from anxieties that

are at least somewhat rooted in truth. The science populist and gregarious physicist Neill DeGrasse Tyson has, by his ac-counts, devoted months of symposia and panel discussions to dispelling audience-queried myths of imminent doomsday. In short, none of them hold much water. However, the most sur-prising tale from Tyson, perhaps, is the acknowledgment that an object called “99942 Apophis” has a real possibility of strik-ing the Earth in 2036. It is one of many “rogue” asteroids tran-siting the solar system, and has a diameter of roughly 270 me-ters (890 feet), and would impart a massive release of kinetic energy if it happened to strike Earth. This finding may be cause for real concern, but more likely it will simply be fodder for the creation of new and fresh myths. This object was marked for concern in December of 2004, and slated for impact in 2029, but new data showed that it would be a very near miss.

An object called “99942 Apophis” has a real possibility of striking the Earth in 2036.Among the leading “theories” there is hardly anything factual to be distilled. The “galactic alignment” is a very routine occasion, and in fact occurs at every solstice as the Earth and Sun align with the galactic plane in very mun-dane, predictable fashion. Impact by an entire planet is even more dubious, and laughed off within the science communi-ty. Fears about the Large Hadron Collider's destructive po-tential seem to be a combination of sensationalist misinfor-mation and residual doomsday fetishization leftover from the Cold War and possibly before.

Doomsday fantasy is a very human invention. While mass ex-tinction events have occurred throughout natural history - in fact we are currently creating one of the quickest die-offs in Earth’s history - the concept of “the end of the world” doesn’t necessarily parse in practical reality. Whether people admit it or not, there is an undying fascination with humanity’s demise. The prehistoric Mount Toba eruption is an example of a proto-Apocalyptic, Black Swan event that ducks human

memory. Roughly 70,000 years ago, the human population is thought to have bottlenecked to some 10,000 individuals. This is by far the largest proportional die-off of the human species thus far. Yet, because it’s so far removed by history, it isn’t regarded with the same finalistic reverance reserved for doomsday theories. Looking back, any notions the prehistor-ic victims of Toba had of “the end of the world” seem absurd in light of our current development.

Even if it isn’t articulated as such, most of our species seems to believe that we have a capital-D Destiny which we are ei-ther straying from or fulfilling, in varying degrees. On an individual level, speculation about our terminus results in numerous afterlife beliefs and unwavering commitments to doomsday predictions that, while entertaining, have univer-sally proven to be apocryphal lines in the sand. If humans are going to be special, then our terminus is largely held to be special as well - ‘the “end” of humanity must be cinematic or it can’t really be the end.’ In extreme cases, it becomes appar-ent that many people just can’t imagine the world continuing without their personal presence to observe it.

As with other conspiracy theories like the 9-11 Truthers, or the New Age junk science that populates used book store shelves, the 2012 hysteria reveals more about the state of society as it exists today rather than its ultimate end. It represents the deep-seated fears and anxieties of a growing subculture of the populace and utilizes the guise of scien-tific reassurance to claim legitimacy. 2012 theories and mass media cash-ins reveal a deep-seated feeling of vulnerability just as much as they offer a superficial romp through civili-zation’s explosion-filled demise. Movies are more formulaic than they’re given credit for, and on some level this movie is likely just “[Relevant cultural anxiety] + too many special effects to comprehend.” I’ll watch it, but I’ll hold myself back from becoming too engrossed to play the world's tini-est violin in the theatre.

02 – 08 december 200916

sound & vision

The last thing crossing most consumers’ minds in a recession is: It would be awfully nice to fill some wall space with a nice piece of locally-produced art. Hmm…But why is this? Galleries won’t stay afloat on their own – most continue their humble existence on donations and sales of the artwork they feature. Between Minneapolis’s free museums and innumerable art galleries, we’re an art-spoiled crowd – sometimes we need to be reminded of the careful world these galleries exist in.

Franklin Art WorksTo your right hang a cluster of old cell phones. Occasionally one will start to buzz, which will grow into a low trembling roar until the entire suspended pile is in a frenzied vibration. But other than that, it’s a bare white room. If you go late enough in the day there might not even be anyone at the reception desk – the whole place might feel abandoned. A slide projector someone forgot to unplug is in a side room with dark wallpaper showing pictures of a wom-an’s face from various angles, and the pages of a book turning.

Franklin Art Works was built as a silent movie theater in 1916, but eventually served as an adult movie theater, a bicycle shop, and an underground venue before being purchased by Franklin Art Works. The current exposition, primarily of works by Chris Baker (with the exception of Alex Fleming’s projector piece) uses only the main floor, but Baker’s selec-tions are rich enough for his two main works – Murmur Study and Hello World! or How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise – to leave you satisfied. However, on the sec-ond floor is a large performance space, unchanged since the building’s debut as a movie theater.

Chris Baker, a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program, uses the space excellently, with Murmur Study taking up the bulk of the lobby. Strips of evenly spaced and gracefully hanging printer paper are attached to comput-ers at the roof that feed down into an endless, overwhelm-ing pile of already-printed receipt paper. The computers are programmed to pick up, in real time, tweets from the website Twitter that contain particularly emotional keywords. The

result, as in his other piece, is a cacophony of highly per-sonal background noise, in this case beautifully cast into a massive pile of junk on the floor. Hello World! features hundreds of personal video confessions, each tiny and each with an audio track playing. The volume swells but the individual speeches remain indistinguishable. Occa-sionally an image on one of the individual video squares will catch your attention, but it will quickly change. The works inhabit the bare white space of the gallery well. The small exhibition space packs a lot of interesting ma-terial and – being fairly easy to walk through – is an ex-cellent gallery for a quick visit.

Art of ThisLike any respectable gallery, Art of This morphs itself to the needs of their featured artist. Within its white walls and behind an unassumingly pale red door, Art of This exists as a small dynamic entity in the midst of an oth-erwise lackluster region of Minneapolis. The gallery is

alice vislova

advising office when walking into the sleek gallery space.

The Gallery @ Fox Tax is rather business-chic. Its modest sign, huge front windows and minimal furnishings also add to its mystique. White and brick walls frame a collection of black leather couches that look small and ornamental, mak-ing the surrounding artwork look even more outrageous.

The current exhibit on display at The Gallery @ Fox Tax is Heavy Petting, a collection of paintings by Rob McBroom that draw on images from the Edward Lear poem, “The Owl and the Pussy Cat.” The pieces each feature a selection of the text incorporated into a vibrant painting of bright, almost garish, colors, along with glitter, plastic jewels, and found objects. The paintings are displayed in sequence, but arguably each portrays a whole story of its own.

Around the corner, another smaller gallery space sits empty, patiently waiting for the next exhibit.

While a small, one-room gallery might not be enough to draw you over to Fox Tax, it might make a nice addition to a day trip to northeast. Neighboring establishments like the Red Stag Supper Club and overwhelmingly cute gift shop I Like You are reason enough to linger around the block and serve as a striking reminder that this part of Minneapolis has threat-ened for years to become the next Uptown.

At the very least, Fox Tax is quite possibly the most aestheti-cally pleasing place to have your taxes done. Somehow that alone makes it seem like a good idea.

17www.wakemag.org

sound & vision

a small, cryptic presence among the bleak housing and petrol station that draws traffic to this tragic region of Nicollet Ave.

But Art of This’ latest featured artist, Bruce Tapola, has cre-ated a barrier between the gallery and its outside world. A lengthy white wall rests between the gallery and its front win-dows, blocking most of the view the audience has to dull archi-tecture across the street and the delurid glow of passing cars.

Tapola’s work features an eclectic mixture of mediums – from paintings to elaborate structures resembling branches. Photos impaled by smaller bits of wood dangle from the floating struc-ture. It’s a melancholic expression of what the outside world is reticent of. As the audience paces about the space they are sub-tly reminded of that fateful petrol station outside by a circle hacked out of the white barrier at the front of the gallery. The Au Natural exhibit will be displayed through December 6.

As a non-profit, artist-run space, Art of This depends on art sales, grants, and private donations to continue to feature new media and experimental artwork. The gallery also features unique one-night music shows every other week as part of an Improvised music series.

The Gallery @ Fox TaxLocated along First Ave. in northeast Minneapolis lies a gal-lery with an identity crisis. Fox Tax, located one block from the bustle of Central Ave., feels just a little hidden. While the name implies it, you might not realize you’re in a tax preparation and

Like any respectable gallery, Art of This morphs itself to the needs of their featured artist. Within its white walls and behind an unassumingly pale red door

Art of This depends on art sales, grants, and private donations to continue to feature new media and experimental artwork.

27 october – 10 november 200912

feature

The Saint Paul Union Depot stands tall with the charm of 1923 neoclassical architecture – at its entrance are huge col-umns and large glass doors, the grass inside the half-circle driveway contains tasteful, well-trimmed shrubbery, and when it’s not a wintry abyss across the metro area, flowers line the rim of the drive as well. Inside, the Headhouse is complete with beautiful shiny marble floors, huge windows both on the walls and overhead. A bridge over Kellogg Bou-levard connects to the concourse where the station meets the tracks. It’s a good looking train station. It’s just too bad there are no trains running through it. The last passen-ger train through the place was in 1971. Nowadays all that people do there is eat Greek food and send letters. But that may soon change.

Plans are developing to bring back commuter rail ser-vices to Minnesota. On Oct. 14, parts of these plans were unveiled at the Saint Paul depot itself when the Minne-sota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) held its second round of open houses to present new analyses of the state’s rail needs and to get input from citizens. The open house in Saint Paul was one of seven meetings that took place in different parts of the state, including Du-

luth, Rochester and Saint Cloud. The subsequent step will be to finalize plans and release them by the end of the year. The plans will then be used as a comprehensive framework around which individual projects can be oriented.

MnDOT, working with Cambridge Systematics, priori-tized different train line projects according to the amount of usage they’d get. Cambridge consults offices of the U.S. Department of Transportation as well as a variety of other federal and state agencies having to do with transportation, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Transit Administration.

Ridership forecasts for various routes are “certainly the crux” of the decision making, says Marc Cutler, a planner with Cambridge Systematics. Lines that come first on the list of priorities are as follows: a line from the Twin Cities to Saint Cloud and then Moorhead , a line to Duluth, a line to Mankato, and a high-speed line through Red Wing and Winona over to Milwaukee and Chicago. The first phase of the project would give the high-speed line a top speed of 110 miles per hour, and the other lines a top speed of 79 miles per hour. The rails would however be upgradeable to 150 miles per hour speeds, at a significant additional cost.

Planners think the lines would get a lot of use - Cambridge Sys-tems predicts that the Chicago and Saint Cloud lines would see over a million annual trips by 2030, and there could be 400,000 to 600,000 riders on routes to Duluth and Rochester.

Assuming funding for this massive undertaking can be found, the time could be now for a revamp of Midwest transporta-tion infrastructure.

“This is a unique moment in time” for rail transportation in Minnesota, says Cutler. Federal funding “has suddenly ap-peared before us.”

Federal funding appears in the form of an $8 billion dollar chunk of February’s $787 billion federal stimulus package designated for high-speed rail via projects with the National Environmental Policy Act. To understand how high the com-petition is for this money, imagine 8 slices of pumpkin pie vied for by 50 pie-craving diners. According to Reuters, 24 states filled out 45 applications for a piece of this $8 billion train pie. The amount of money requested totals $50 billion. Though officials had expected to be able to begin doling out grants this month, they now expect they won’t be writing any checks until later this winter, due to the overwhelming num-

Trains Keep Rollin’ On

By Patrick Larkin

jonathan knisely

13www.wakemag.org

feature

ber of applications. The New York Times reports that the only Minnesota project in the White House’s top ten rail priorities list is the track between Chicago and Minneapolis. MnDOT also lists an additional $40 billion in federal funds for the state to potentially glean, mostly in the form of loans, for vari-ous -to-city and intercity rail projects.

MnDOT announced its application for $382 million from federal stimulus money in August. This amount would go to-wards a Saint Cloud extension of the soon-to-open Northstar line from Minneapolis to Big Lake, as well as a high-speed rail system from Chicago to the Twin Cities up to Duluth.

The state has predicted that the project costs for their rail plan would cost about $8.4 billion, or $7.2 billion if the up-grades were done as one system. The projects outlined in the first phase would cost about $5.3 billion.

Cutler cautions that the rail plan is an “incremental, multi-generational task.” He uses the example of the interstate highway system – it didn’t appear overnight, and the early highways were not as good as the later ones. Each train line will be treated as an independent start-up project, meaning there will be different timelines for each project.

Cutler also stressed the importance of learning from other transit systems’ mistakes, referring to the New York City’s Penn Station and Grand Central Station. There is currently no direct connection between these two major transportation hubs. While the original plan for Twin Cities rails would’ve only put a depot in St. Paul, the state has since changed direc-tions to include large commuter train depots in both St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Some lines are certainly coming along more quickly than others. The Northstar commuter rail, for example, is on its way. The line’s grand opening will take place on Nov. 14 of this year, and it will begin regular commuter travel on Monday, Nov. 16. The route will run from downtown Min-neapolis out to Big Lake, a bedroom community of the Twin Cities that’s not far from Saint Cloud. The $320 million cost of the project is shared by state and federal governments, as well as by Anoka, Hennepin, and Sherburne counties, the Metropolitan Council, and the Minnesota Twins. It is estimated that 3,400 people a day will use the train on weekdays from the get go.

The Northstar can travel at a maximum speed of 79 miles per hour, and with six stops, the duration of the route will be about 50 minutes. It connects with the Hiawatha light rail by

Target field and then goes on to Fridley, Coon Rapids, Anoka, Elk River, and finally Big Lake.

Dave Christianson, the project manager from MnDOT, also says that the train corridor between the Twin Cities and Du-luth, dubbed the Northern Lights Express, is also far ahead of most other corridors. He says the project is one step away from final design, and that it has seen full support along the line. While there is the question of funding, he says the route could be in operation by 2015 or 2016. Christianson also al-ludes to additional rail corridors with grassroots support, such as a line to Eau Claire, Wis.

When looking at the future of the Minnesota railways, it is important to note that there was a time when the Saint Paul Union Depot was truly a bustling transportation hub. At one time there were 18 tracks serving the place, which 282 trains and 20,000 passengers used daily. This fact was brought up at the Question and Answer portion of the Rail Plan meeting on Oct. 14 when an audience member recalled a time in the 1950’s when there were three daily trips from the Saint Paul depot directly to Union Station Chicago that took little more than six hours.

Today, the Amtrak web site lists two daily trips that take eight hours – Google Maps estimates the drive time be-tween Saint Paul and Chicago at 6 hours and 14 minutes. The Amtrak ticket costs $96 if you buy it within a few days of your trip, or $56 if you buy it in advance. The same trip by automo-bile would cost $47 in a car with a poor fuel efficiency of 20 miles per gallon.

The Union Depot is currently owned by the U.S. Postal Ser-vice and private owners. In June 2009, the Ramsey County Board approved the purchase of the depot’s concourse and the 9 miles of land connected to it from the U.S. Postal Ser-vice for $49.6 million, and is trying to purchase the Head-house from private owners for another $8.1 million. The mail-men will be relocating to a space in Eagan in 2010, at which point the county will begin a $237.5 million project to revamp the space to once again be used for its original purpose. Dave Christianson says that Amtrak signed a letter of intent to op-erate out of the Saint Paul Union Depot in 2012.

Minnesota’s rail plans are in conjunction with a larger Mid-western rail plan which would bring high-speed trains to a number of major Midwestern cities. The Midwest Rail Initia-tive is proposing 110 mile per hour trains from Chicago to Milwaukee, Green Bay, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinatti, and Saint Louis.

Coon Rapids StationAnoka

Station Ballpark Station

Fridley Station

Elk River Station

Big Lake Station

18 november – 01 december 2009 12

By Eric Dolski

UPDATE

We in American society are told that people are busy these days, so perhaps speed over depth is marketable.

Getting News Ten Mouthfuls at a Time

At the opposite end of the spectrum, some news aggre-gators have the necessary zing but not the panopticon scope of a service like Google News. Newsy.com takes one such novel approach. Rewrap coverage of the same story by different news organizations to produce an arguably more balanced piece of journalism in a broad-cast format. For instance, the Newsy.com story “GM Opts to Keep Opel” cites six different sources: the BBC, Russia Today, Der Speigel, CBC News, The Wall Street Journal, and Deutsche Welle. The con, however, is the same as the pro in Newsy.com’s case: One three-minute story thoroughly covers each topic. It’s fast and effi-cient, which Newsy.com founder Jim Spencer touts as a key element for news consumers, but it’s also rigid and fundamentally limited. At its core, it regurgitates the coverage of other news organizations into a headline news format. The site itself looks good while it’s doing this regurgitating, but the site slogan “The News With More Views” simply doesn’t lend itself to a three-min-ute headline news format. Imagine reading three sto-ries about University of Minnesota campus arrests in three different publications: The Wake, The Minnesota Daily, and the Star Tribune. Each story may have a dif-ferent perspective and a different way of analyzing the arrests. Will these different perspectives and analy-ses retain their uniqueness when a website like Newsy.com aggregates them into one mass? The results will be hit and miss, but if the uniqueness disappears, then the novelty of news has disappeared as well, replaced with something akin to the dullest of Associated Press briefs. Note, however, that speed over depth is the pur-pose of Newsy.com, though not of all aggregators. We in American society are told that people are busy these days, so perhaps speed over depth is marketable. Only time will tell.

Let’s shift the focus to something that offers both the necessary content and the fabled zing, albeit with-

News aggregators are the middlemen in an Internet f illed with producers and consumers. You want news about horse races? Grisly murders? Escaped orang utans? News sources create and aggregators provide. The pur-pose of a news aggregator is to consolidate news content in one place, much like a newspaper with its multiple un-related sections. However, most aggregators display the content instead of producing it. Ideally, a news aggrega-tor scours the web for the quality content and leaves the junk to rot. In practice, the process often breaks down into a jelly of mediocrity.

For a crash course in aggregation, let’s head over to one of the reigning barons of news aggregation: Google News (a.k.a. news.google.com). The place is clean, but not sparse. I can see section links to my left, a pillar of print stories down the middle, and headlines to my right. Links to video are interspersed among the text when available, but print is the brunt of the information presented. Maybe it’s my devo-tion to Google as a search engine that makes me feel at home here on Google News. Maybe it’s this sensation of being at home that makes me want to leave as quickly as I can.

Google News is one of many news aggregators that of-fers content but not the zing. The content is there, truck-loads of it, but news content on the Internet isn’t worth the fiber-optic filaments that it travels through. We can get our Internet news from anywhere; a major media site, an analyst’s blog, a journalist’s twitter and other, hipper places besides. We can even get off the Internet entirely if we dare to be so contrarian. News is everywhere for the time being and cheap to boot, so while Google News may provide a decent service, the sustainable economic model simply isn’t there. As a tentacle of the greater Google Inc. octopus, Google News gets along fine. However, Google News is unsustainable without the name. Zing is what sells, and Google News has no zing. It’s the dull-looking kid who’s the son of illustrious parents but has few pros-pects of his own.

Zing is what sells, and Google News has no zing. It’s the dull-looking kid who’s the son of illustrious parents but has few prospects of his own.

wakuBETA

UPDATE

Wednesday 18NOVEMBER 2009

13www.wakemag.org

We in American society are told that people are busy these days, so perhaps speed over depth is marketable.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, some news aggre-gators have the necessary zing but not the panopticon scope of a service like Google News. Newsy.com takes one such novel approach. Rewrap coverage of the same story by different news organizations to produce an arguably more balanced piece of journalism in a broad-cast format. For instance, the Newsy.com story “GM Opts to Keep Opel” cites six different sources: the BBC, Russia Today, Der Speigel, CBC News, The Wall Street Journal, and Deutsche Welle. The con, however, is the same as the pro in Newsy.com’s case: One three-minute story thoroughly covers each topic. It’s fast and effi-cient, which Newsy.com founder Jim Spencer touts as a key element for news consumers, but it’s also rigid and fundamentally limited. At its core, it regurgitates the coverage of other news organizations into a headline news format. The site itself looks good while it’s doing this regurgitating, but the site slogan “The News With More Views” simply doesn’t lend itself to a three-min-ute headline news format. Imagine reading three sto-ries about University of Minnesota campus arrests in three different publications: The Wake, The Minnesota Daily, and the Star Tribune. Each story may have a dif-ferent perspective and a different way of analyzing the arrests. Will these different perspectives and analy-ses retain their uniqueness when a website like Newsy.com aggregates them into one mass? The results will be hit and miss, but if the uniqueness disappears, then the novelty of news has disappeared as well, replaced with something akin to the dullest of Associated Press briefs. Note, however, that speed over depth is the pur-pose of Newsy.com, though not of all aggregators. We in American society are told that people are busy these days, so perhaps speed over depth is marketable. Only time will tell.

Let’s shift the focus to something that offers both the necessary content and the fabled zing, albeit with-

out a shred of the English language for the discerning monolingual American to read. 2424actu.fr has a dark, sports-car sleek design uncommon in most mainstream news sites, perhaps to draw in that younger crowd who’s already getting sick of the black on gray with a little bit of white around the edges style that the reigning French news sites already offer. In addition to the design, though, 2424actu.fr has content—and not just content, but depth of content. Say I want to know more about the story of Michael Jackson’s death. I click on the video link for the story and I’m brought to an AFP (French equiva-lent of the Associated Press) video news brief. However, I also have the choice of hearing the story through video or radio from ten or fifteen other sources, plus scores of print sources besides. In American terms, this would be the equivalent of being able to see, hear, and read CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, the AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times all in one place.

The problem? The site only streams video for those with a French IP address. But an American version may come someday soon; and the news aggregator landscape may develop yet another wrinkle because of it. After all, en-trepreneurship steals from many places.

Aggregators are one more answer to the challenge of making journalism more accessible and more profit-able. Everyone in the Internet news biz takes a different approach. Some get as many sources as they can, some simplify as much as they can, and some seek to make their site a one-stop shop for every conceivable devel-opment. MSNBC tries for the latter with their “Spec-tra Visual News Reader.” Imagine a Nintendo Wii game where all you do is read news; that’s what this is. Choose your feeds and watch the stories come and go. As hip and trendy as the Spectra Visual News Reader seeks to be, it’s still a profoundly inelegant piece of software—a Segway in the world of news aggregators. Spectra would

make a great screensaver, but to think that anyone would use this thing as their primary news source is unlikely.

The issue with news aggregators overall is this: Whether they have the zing, the content, both or neither, there’s still little demand for them. Aggregators today are a niche product. Who needs ten different sources for the same story? If I want to listen to Fox News coverage of something, by golly, I’ll go to Fox News. If I want to lis-ten to MSNBC coverage of something, by golly, I’ll go to MSNBC. If I want both, I’ll go to both—why should I go to a middleman first?

Speaking not as a student or a consumer of news but as the average hypothetical layman, what does a news ag-gregator offer me? Not much that I don’t already have. Aggregators may provide varied coverage of an event or offer coverage of something that would otherwise have gone unheard had I gone to a major news site instead, but, for better or worse, these are things that laymen have afforded themselves to lose. Aggregators don’t break the big stories and they don’t nab enough small ones. Some aggregators like Newsy.com and 2424actu.fr are certainly pretty things in pretty packages, but do we need our news to be pretty? Or is news supposed to remain what it is today, whatever it is today? We, the people, whether we realize or not, will decide with our wallets and our habits.

Zing is what sells, and Google News has no zing. It’s the dull-looking kid who’s the son of illustrious parents but has few prospects of his own. Zing is what sells, and Google News has no zing. It’s the dull-looking kid...

We in American society are told that people are busy these days, so perhaps speed over depth is marketable.

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