Two newspapers

Two newspapers are now delivered every morning onto the stones of the center strip in my driveway, a little after daybreak.

It used to be three but I canceled the LA Times because I wasn’t reading it and I realized my friends from the old federal court press room don’t work there anymore.

So now I read the Financial Times and on occasion The New York Times before putting on my helmet and bright green vest with silver reflective stripes and bicycling off to work at Courthouse News.

But when I don’t get to the paper that day, it doesn’t get read. It goes into the refrigerator to line a shelf or into the recycle bin.

So why is yesterday’s paper old news, not worth reading.

In the Planet III opinion that gave us victory after ten years of litigation over court access in California, the first line by Ninth Circuit Judge Kim Wardlaw was. “The peculiar value of news is in the spreading of it while it is fresh.”

She is right, but why. And next to that truth, what about history. That’s pretty interesting too.

When something matters to you, then you want to know right away about events that touch on that topic. So political events here and in Europe are important from my viewpoint. Hard to put in words why that is.

Political events, along with economic changes, and climate, alter the course of a nation and its society, and ricochet onto other nations. I am interested, and concerned, on that great subject.

So it is human nature, meaning something innate and difficult to explain, to want to know quickly about new happenings in those areas that matter to us. As an aside, the area that matters to the greatest number of the Courthouse News webpage readers is guns.

When it comes to our daily reports on new litigation — which is the bread and butter of this news organization because Google has gobbled up the entire ad market for written news — the reports pop, seem to shine with news, when they describe new pleadings that have just been filed.

So in our many lawsuits against clerks who are restricting access, I have had to explain to judges why we need to see new pleadings quickly, why speed matters for the reports that sustain us.

In the witness box before Judge Morgan in the Eastern District of Virginia, I testified: Courthouse News’ cycle follows the basic cycle of life. News happens during the day, it’s reported during the day, it’s consumed, it’s read, seen, heard, that day and discussed, and then everybody goes to sleep and the whole cycle starts again the next day.  If you try to take old news and push it into that current cycle, the old news automatically goes in underneath, like a lower stratum. It’s not as widely read, it’s not as valuable or important.

When he ruled in our favor, the judge said from the bench: I think that the point the plaintiff’s making is that it has its news value as soon as it happens. If you don’t get it when it’s fresh, it’s like stale bread or stale anything else. So I think the plaintiff’s point on that is well-taken.

But speed can also be a venom. A friend in Europe was commenting that news outlets race to be first online with some twist on the news, and they make mistakes.

So we hired a kid recently who had just graduated college as a history major, for a job as reporter. He interviewed in front of a background of the Roman coliseum with a Star Wars fighter jet above it. I mentioned a podcast called the History of Rome and he enthusiastically said it had inspired him to pursue history.

From that podcast, I know that a couple thousand years ago, the Romans accumulated so many slaves that the economy of Rome collapsed. The slaves had no money to spend.

You see, it’s what just happened that we want to know about. But it’s also what happened a couple thousand years ago that informs us.

So I read in the Financial Times picked up off the driveway, as the machine is making the first cup of coffee, that the tech companies are laying off thousands of employees because of the advent of artificial intelligence. As I see it, the new software that mimics the brain combined with ever-evolving robots — those are the new slaves.

Will those developments boost our economy or sink it. History has a lesson for us.

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