Media maniacs
As manias go, the one I suffer from isn't that bad. It could be a lot worse. I mean, I don't have to worry about the kinds of tricky situations that erotomania would lead me into, and I don't have to fear the damage that kleptomania or pyromania might cause me to inflict. No, as a sufferer of graphomania I find that my burden is bearable.
An insatiable desire to understand what's going on in the world is at the root of my ailment for as soon as I happen upon a stimulating story I have to copy it or clip it and then scribble down something about it. This has led to living in a dwelling strewn with books, magazines, scraps of paper and jotters of all shapes, sizes, origins and ages. My news addiction and the related writing compulsion make for a kind of sad life, but I've got some good news for you. And no, it's not that I've been cured; it's that compared to Mark Halperin, I'm happy and healthy.
Mark Halperin is the founder of The Note, the hot, hot, hot political news compendium that appears on the ABC News website each weekday morning at 11 o'clock EST. Given the amount of information that Halperin has to consume daily to produce The Note, he has synchronized his "biological rhythms with the news cycle, so that information is not lying out there unanalyzed for too long." As he result he has abandoned the conventional 24-hour chronology that most of us live by and he now measures time "not by conventional units — hours, minutes — but by news programs". Halperin is the focus of a, well, compelling article in the current issue of The New Yorker. The piece is subtitled "Mark Halperin and the transformation of the Washington establishment". Here's an excerpt:
"Technology has both liberated and tyrannized Halperin, at once allowing him to move from Washington to Manhattan — 'my dirty little secret' — and inundating him with an ever-greater, faster barrage of data. In his New York office, amid piles of campaign memorabilia, he has mounted six television screens, each tuned to a different news channel, and he has learned to watch them all simultaneously. He can read and send e-mails on his BlackBerry, even as he does live television interviews (though he tries to wait until a cutaway). He carries newspapers rolled under his arm, the way an architect totes his drawings, so that during free moments — the six minutes it takes (he's timed it) to get from his apartment to the newsroom, say, or at 5 a.m. on the StairMaster, before the 'Imus in the Morning' radio show — he can absorb new information. He also depends on his longtime girlfriend, Karen Avrich, who works as a researcher on nonfiction books, as 'a fail-safe system' to catch details that he might miss. In addition, he has a small team of young reporters, who share the burden of producing The Note, and who are often, to their chagrin, mistaken for 'the Googling monkeys,' a term that Halperin jokingly invokes in his newsletter to explain the mystifying way in which The Note processes so much information. 'I couldn't do this alone,' Halperin said. 'Ten papers, maybe twenty-but not fifty.'
An excerpt there from INSIDE DOPE by DAVID GRANN, which appears in the current issue of The New Yorker. With his television monitors, newspapers, radio, laptop, BlackBerry, mobile phone and pager, Mark Halperin will be seen by some, no doubt, as a tragic figure; a victim of the news, an addict of information, a compulsive, a maniac. Know what I think? I envy him.
