Here’s the third in my triple-feature coverage of my town’s local paper, the Whitewater Register. I’ll divide coverage of the 8/21 issue into two parts, because this issue is chock-full of rich, creamy, chocolaty status-quo goodness.
The lead story is on recycling, and a public interest group’s finding that in five of Wisconsin’s counties there “are some barriers” to recycling. Are any of those counties nearby? The story doesn’t say. What are the barriers to recycling, should we be one of those counties? The story doesn’t say.
Nonetheless, this is the lead story of the Register, shoehorning out-of-town news as though it were local. In 24 (that’s twenty-four) paragraphs, we never learn where the barrier-ridden counties are, or what those barriers might be.
The subtitle of the story is unintentionally funny: “New initiative hopes to boost city’s, state’s commitment to the 3Rs.” The story never tells us what those three Rs, in fact, are. (The SMART website, at Wisconsin Be SMART Coalition’s website tells us – they’re REDUCE, REUSE, and RECYCLE.”)
The three Rs used to be, so to speak, “reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic.” That was when schooling was important, presumably, and when people actually remembered what those three Rs were.
If one wants to know the modern 3 Rs, one has to put down the local paper’s lengthy story, and surf the Web.