The Reek of Sweatband Journalism

Laugh if you will but I know some cats who would buy this rig if it really existed. And in time it just might. We already have cameras the size of finger-sandwiches, laptops that out-slice yesterday's fanciest edit suites before they're fully powered-up and cell phones that double as jukeboxes. Can it be too long before some knob straps a series of pullies and levers to his head and bills himself as the world's first Sweatband Journalist? I can see it now: a 24 hour feed of far-flung, fish-eyed forehead footage - squiggly images culled from the bouncing glass of the global vloggeratti.

Is that the inevitable evolution of broadcast news? Naah, we'll always have some hottie with good diction and even better gams spoonfeeding us the news. What will change are the field correspondents, the look of their reports and the staid way we insist on filtering the daily spew. That ain't all bad I guess - but as one who savors the languid pace of CBS Sunday Morning AND the latest slam-dancing dorks of YouTube lore - I sure hope both documentary disciplines are available on my cable dial, or wristwatch iPod, or whatever pocket-oculater we're crashing our flying cars over in the coming years.

I just hope I'm through squeezing life through a tube by then. Maybe move up to the hills and spend the rest of the Information Renaissance locked away in some unplugged cabin, wrestling with the written word. The wife says she's up for it too - as long as there's a Starbuck's, Panera Bread and TJ Maxx within ten easy miles...