Boone Hospital Center considers five options for future

There is an allure to day turns. It’s fun to dive into an issue, explore it for a bit, write it up, AC it, edit and walk away. There’s a level of productivity, of objective results. You feel like you did something.

Longer, more unwieldy stories that take days and weeks to put together don’t have the appeal of instant gratification. Which, I guess is why I’m drawn to them. Not necessarily for myself (at least in this respect — I’m the type of obsessive person that wants to know all the ins and outs of a story, so I get a lot of gratification from that (and maybe from knowing more than other people…)). But, I believe that our culture needs to reflect. We need to take the time to ingest the news. The world is a big, ungainly place and we need more than headlines. And day turns, at times, can feel like headlines. They don’t always, for me, tell the whole story.

Which isn’t a bad thing, and it isn’t even always feasible for them to do so — the story isn’t over yet. And if you are lucky enough to sit down with the paper every day and follow the updates and follow the twists and turns, then these short, day-of stories aren’t bad at all. But, I assume most people can’t do that. They read one thing, get busy and distracted by life, and let their opinion ossify.

What I mean to say, though, is that, some nights, it’s nice to go home feeling like you’ve accomplished something.