I’m guessing I’m healthier for my attention to social media dropping to near zero and oddly, perhaps, better at my work.

I snipped the cord fully with cable news after a few last experiments toggling between FOX and CNN in fall 2016. Outrage is not information, emotions stoked not the same as gaining perspective. There I found ashes for news value. Can’t say I miss the hot air.

So my diet is down to comparative nuts and berries: Some NPR when I drive, newspapers and magazines online, an eye on KPCW and Town Lift. And books, lots of books, though those give insight into the news rather than carrying news themselves.

The last time I paid close attention to local television news was in the late 1990s while night editor at The North County Times in northern San Diego County. We had nine zones and served a population of 2 million with two presses that each stood three stories tall. We were pretty big, 100th largest in the nation, but still very junior to The Union-Tribune.

In our daily 2 p.m. news meetings we were meticulous with our page one planning for each zone and metro front. Around 7, maybe 8 or later, I’d nearly always tear all that up after seeing what the local stations were reporting. Stories they had that we needed to jump on. Stories we got to push up because they didn’t have ’em. There was also national and sometimes world news breaking like surf on the wire services to consider.

We’d have to wait to see each morning what The U-T had in its northern zones, along with Riverside’s Press-Enterprise. Newspaper competition then was a marathon, though not so different than watching KPCW and Town Lift and trying to maximize our strengths and mitigate weaknesses accordingly, only more in real time.

In the smaller communities and ski towns we’d keep a looser eye on the metros and the national outlets. Mainly our attention was local, especially if we competed with another daily or weekly. Television news became less of a thing, and local radio a bit more.

Now it’s all online in terms of competitive footing. Amid the resulting digital froth and fragmentation, having a clear identity has only risen in importance for news organizations, as well.

For The Park Record, that means focusing locally. Once upon a time, the little town papers tried to include a bit of everything in each edition, before everything was only a click or swipe away.

In a sense, I burned the boats behind us when I landed here. No more Associated Press to fill out the report if we ran short with our own resources. I did hedge, though, working out an arrangement with The Salt Lake Tribune much like the Colorado papers with The Denver Post to run some of their stories when appropriate, and vice versa if they should see fit.

So maybe not all the boats, then. Still, we’re aiming beyond the traditional “local first” of community papers to local only.

Local means the geographic community, of course. It also means issues of greater interest to this local community that other ski towns share. Things like housing, costliness, traffic, quality of life, climate trends, skiing.

Social media, like the gossip channels of yore, provides its own flood of potential insight into news, I know. The online grapevine bears multiples more than what we could get in person at the bar, the grocery store, the kids’ ball games. But underneath the froth, it’s all the same ol’, same ol’, whitewater unchanging.

I get away with or benefit from my bookish ways because we have people willing to fish the digital streams for the story-worthy bits. This is just the world they swim in, which has risen around nearly all of us.

Still, while the products of journalism often go on social media, journalism itself is not social media. I suspect we may even be foolish posting there, a venue based far more on personal expression than vetted information. Gossip and news are fundamentally different, serving different ends. So why are we commingling “content” and thereby confusing one for the other?

Yes, I know why. It’s where click bait and obsession with audience, any audience, come from in my calling, neglecting the important question: what audience?

The more thoughtful among a citizenry gravitates to journalism. The work alone attracts a better educated, wealthier and more civic-minded audience. I don’t see a truly compelling reason to preen for distracted, addled scrollers fooled by posing, sensation, outrage and roiling streams of nonsense.

So I do turn to literature for insight more helpful to my work than Instagram or X, FOX or CNN. I just don’t find answers there. Not the right ones, anyway.

Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at drogers@parkrecord.com or (970) 376-0745.