​One of the signs of our times is increasingly lazy reporting. As a journalist myself, I know how hard it is to dig up a story, do research, get quality references to interview, ask important and useful questions that yield information to frame an event or incident, then have the time to write the piece cogently and compellingly. It’s easier to cut corners.

And many reporters do. I’d argue it’s part of our human nature. We often look for the easier path. For a journalist, that’s the story handed to you. It falls in your lap, and you take a press release and write a story from that, ignoring any follow-up or calling other sources to get additional perspective to flesh a story out.

We’ve all got the laziness gene, some of us to a greater extent than others. When reporters cut corners to do their jobs, we suffer as readers or viewers of the content. We really don’t know we’ve been shortchanged.
 
You see lazy reporting playing out often on the pro golf tour. The easy story is Tiger Woods. He’s the great fall back – because he’s so well-known, if there isn’t some other angle to a story (which there always is, BTW), you can write something about Tiger. It’s easy.

You can contemplate his comeback. You can write about his injuries. You can speculate on what’s going to happen next year if he gets better or plays the game at “full strength.”
 
Those stories don’t require much work. You can easily speculate off the top of your head (something the TV prognosticators and predictors do all the time) and give your opinion as a talking head about something in Tiger’s personal or professional life. You just talk. Or you just write. You don’t call anyone or take notes and go back and read through documents to figure something out. Instead, you can blurt out your perspective. Whooopeeee.
 
A little over a month ago, as the 2018 pro golf season wound down in the U.S., Woods was starting to become bigger news. But in one of the tournaments, he had disappeared from the leader’s board. Did that make him a non-story? Of course not.

Ignored that week was a major comeback by Jordan Spieth (though he too flamed out on the final day and became a full non-story). Also ignored were two not-so-big golfing names – Kevin Kisner and Xander Schauffele. Even if you follow golf, you need to be down in the weeds a bit to know these guys. But they deserved the headlines. They deserved to have the video clips shown of the phenomenal shots they hit.

But they weren’t. They were side notes.
Lazy reporting insults us. It also manipulates us. We are left few options. Those of us who are industrious and who follow a sport or issue closely, will find ways to get the bigger picture. That’s certainly a huge advantage of having Google handy.
 
“Top golfers this weekend not named Tiger Woods,” you command to your Google app. You can get the deluge of golfers whose names you don’t know from that simple step.

You might think reporters should do that. But instead they follow the pack. What’s the hot button item of the day?  Watch them dance to that tune. It’s too bad because there are so many other more interesting stories out there waiting to be written or broadcast. 

This past week, my wife and I took a trip north and ferried across to Michigan, landing in Ludington. The next morning we got up to walk/jog in the brisk air, winds about 15 mph from the north and temperatures in the 40s. Awesome stuff.
 
It energized me. Those types of mornings make me want to be outside, embracing the elements, sucking in the air, marveling at what nature brings us on a daily basis. It’s often a surprise.

If you’re in a car, you miss the show. As I turned around at the northern point of my walk, I came through a park that borders Lake Michigan to the east. Waves pounded in. You heard the roar. White caps smashed into the jetty, spray flying over it.
 
As I walked to the west edge of the parked car area, I counted how many people had decided to start their morning by marveling at Lake Michigan: 12 cars. Walking past each, I made some other mental notes.
 
Of the 12 cars, two were empty as their owners were on the beach jogging. Good on them.

Two young men parked side by side. They chatted catching up on something from their past. I can relate to that. Start your day connecting face-to-face.
 
Eight cars were left. Of those eight, three were eating breakfast. Food, mmmmm, good. Hey, great place to enjoy the taste of a donut, some yogurt, a piece of fruit or your steaming cup of java. I can relate.

Five cars were still there. The person inside each of those cars was not watching the surf, feeling the stiff wind, or consuming their morning dietary quota. Instead, they were all engaged with a tiny screen, looking down at their laps, their eyes locked on some image transmitted to that by a satellite from someplace else far, far away.
 
That saddened me. It is the way of the world. I get that. But driving down to enjoy what this park and the majesty of Lake Michigan has to offer you emotionally to start your day, and then ignoring it, left me in mourning. I mourn for those who don’t experience the elements first-hand.
 
There was a story last week I discussed with my wife about the continuing decline of newspapers and what happens as people start to read more of their news online. The results of the study weren’t necessarily surprising (print continues its decline; online readers skip around more and tend to read more material that reinforces their views/perspective), though one component stood out to me.
 
The nugget was how even dedicated print readers, when faced with only the option to read online, did not stay with the subject matter as long as they did when reading it in a newspaper or magazine. They didn’t dig in. They skipped around more.
 
Again, one could argue that’s not all bad. You can “expose” yourself to more. But do you really get to know the subject matter unless you dig deep? If you’re skipping around on your phone, you miss the outdoors.
 
I mourned for readers that morning as I zipped by the motorists locked into their smart phones. Yeah, maybe they were making a doctor’s appointment or connecting with their daughter at college and it was something important they had to discuss. Many things are possible.

More than likely though they bounced around from site to site, not really paying attention and missing out on the majesty of a Lake Michigan morning delivered for their viewing pleasure. It’s their loss.