Bad Newspapers live for this sort of thing....

I'm speaking of Year, decade, or some other period of time, review stories. Never quite sure about how to address the coming of that frustrating 3-month (or so) period where many personal checks are voided in rage due to incorrect dates, newspaper readers are ensured a steady diet of this or that in review columns which provide the columnist to meet a deadline without having to research a story or, conveniently, do much actual work over the Holidays. The worse the newspaper, the more "year end" pontificating one is likely to find.


In today's ChronBlog?

There are four such 'stories', two of which (by Buggs and Kever) pretty much seem to be the same tale (the Aughts have sucked) told in just about the same way.

If, like most, you don't want to read reporters bloviating on what already happened, let me sum it up for you....

A LOT of funky stuff happened from 2000 to 2009 OK? With the benefit of hindsight some things we did look foolish. Although, we won't mention how we reported on them without said benefit (Hint: ChronBlog was just as ruffled as the rest of society about Y2K.)

I would like to point out for the record, (and much to the relief of the crew over at BlogHouston I'm sure) that the editorial staff at the Almanac will NOT be assigning a 'decade/year/week in review' beat to ourselves. It's happened, let's move on. We also won't be doing one of those "New Year's resolution" posts that bloggers seem to love so much. I have no resolutions for this or any of my other blogs partially because I refuse to take them that seriously.

For the most part bloggy-style resolution lists, "best & worst of" or "year/decade/month in review" efforts are weak, lacking both creativity and analysis of even moderate depth. They're typically deadline busters for when the reporter/columnist/blogger has nothing in the works after downing too much egg-nog. They're as bad as the "Christmas gift" lists that pop up from time to time where some blogger/reporter, feeling themselves in the midst of a creative moment, drum up a Christmas list for their political friends & enemies that's intended to be humorous, but which ultimately falls short due to its inability to recognize its own perspective. Had the Almanac a gift to give it would be a big dollop of self-awareness to many in the blogosphere. (See what I did there?)

The week leading up to New Years is tough. From opinion articles to fond look-backs to the inevitable "We're going to do XXX better dammit!" statement from whatever struggling Government/private-sector organization manages to get their press-release printed first. For the news consumer this week is one of the year's longest.

Until next week, when everything is suddenly "young" and "new again" and we're promised that the NEXT year/decade/month is going to be somehow better than the previous year/decade/month despite the fact that only one day has passed since the pages of bad newspapers were covered with dire retrospectives. It's done every year, the definition of insanity in printed form.

At least they're not calling it "news analysis" this time around.