I Know Less Than You Do Right Now
Aero-Views OPINION by Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien
If you want to find out
about the overall theme of what's happening at Oshkosh this year,
especially in the first few days of the show, you're a lot better
off asking an Aero-News reader than an Aero-News writer or even
editor right now.
Why is that? Because this week kicks off with us being deluged
with a firehose of input. We have to read, record, review, listen,
triage, sort and revise, according to our experience and news
judgment, all this stuff, and then try to provide you with a news
product that's informative and entertaining.
The first few days are especially hectic as exhibitors scramble
for the best press conference slots and hit us with several new
products, new deals, or new angles a day. In addition to the press
conferences with substantial news, there are others where there's
really nothing new... but the exhibitor is trying to spin us as if
there is.
Then there's other news in the rest of the world, including the
every-year sad tale of somebody, or several somebodies, crashing
enroute to the event. Businesses are still making deals, and even
some that are naturals for this market are tied up deal-making
somewhere else.
Governments, commercial and military aerospace, and the airline
sector take no notice of Airventure and continue their routine
activity. There's still a war on; a couple or three of them,
actually. All that generates news.
No one can write it all, so we divide it up. Sometimes you can
follow your interests, sometimes you have to accept an assignment
on something you don't like, or worse, don't understand well. By
the time he or she is done with that report, the reporter is, if
nothing else, better educated on the matter than before.
You might not care about every sort
of news we report. According to our research, many readers don't,
and they often don't understand why anyone would bother with some
of the other stuff. But we've also learned that everybody's got a
different view of what's "news," what's "important," and what's the
"other stuff" that can be gotten rid of.
Believe me, we'd love to trim our workload and cover fewer
things in more depth. The trouble is, every sort of story and
feature we do has a constituency. I once thought it was wasteful
for us to cover Airworthiness Directives -- after all, if you
maintain planes, you subscribe to this information yourself
already. To my personal surprise, I found that numerous readers,
including many who have access to more official AD reports, value
this information.
We have people who are generalists and people who are in-depth
experts on almost every facet of aviation. Most of us are here
because we love the industry, or sport as the case may be. But the
nature of the news business means that we won't have time for
anything more than the narrow, blinkered view of the stories we're
personally covering, which usually but not always are in our field
of expertise. We don't even have time to read our own site to see
what our colleagues have done (we usually catch up after the
show).
So, the paradox is that you the reader may know more about
what's going on in Oshkosh today than I do. As long as a story
takes longer to write and report than it does to read, that'll
probably always be the case, although we're always looking for a
way for technology to streamline our work (The Automatronic
WriterBot 7000 shows some promise... but it only wants to cover
warbirds -- Ed.)
Despite the paradox, I'll be heading out today to try to cover
stories that will, one hopes, be informative and interesting to
both of us. And at the end of the day, if you read the whole site,
I'll still know less than you do.