News this week that Sports Illustrated has fired its entire staff and Pitchfork has been folded under GQ's operations is not exactly shocking, but it is very sad and yet another sign that mainstream, reliable journalism will get just a little bit harder to suss out. I had read SI since I was a little kid, always looking forward to the brilliant long-form journalism that "illustrated" so many compelling sports stories.
The news reports have not been framed as total endings of these two esteemed publications, but the writing is clearly on the wall. And it's a big problem, especially because, for example, kids are getting their knowledge from often suspect social-media accounts and adults are internalizing and espousing information from their Facebook feeds and elsewhere that is from unknown or unreliable sources.
Those are examples of the many, many needs for the U.S. to implement media literacy in school curriculums so that, for example, we can all be spouting a lot less questionable misinformation to each other all day every day.
Another thing that is dying a bit in this country - like once-reliable media - is skiing, because snow has become so sporadic as weather patterns become different and more unpredictable. But that was not the case Saturday, when our family drive our kids and some of their friends to White Tail in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania near the Maryland border. It's about 90 minutes from home, and then it took us an hour in traffic for the last mile just to get to an over-full parking lot. I waited in the car for about another hour after that to wait for a parking spot to open up (and to deal with a dead battery in our friends' minivan that we borrowed) while the others got out and started skiing. The lift lines were nuts and it truly seemed that everyone in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia-Pennsylvania area had shown up to hit the slopes. Once getting past the base lift, however, it was pretty fun on the side mountain with the shorter lift lines and the more difficult runs, especially as the afternoon wore on. The crowds thinned because it was bitter cold and the Baltimore Ravens were playing in the football playoffs.
The world and humans evolve very slowly, and we've moved slowly in the face of many difficult changes. Ski resorts will look very different in 100 years because of climate change. There will no doubt be some difficult times in the years ahead as those industries figure out how to adapt to changes in snowfall patterns and locations. Likewise, media and journalism has gone through monumental change in recent decades and we as humans have not figured out how to consume a much faster, voluminous, and constant flow of information yet.
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