News isn't just trivia

Want to try my local news quiz?:

1 Who is Raleigh's police chief?

2 Name Durham's new police chief (bonus points for naming the two other finalists).

3 What's the size of the proposed state budget?

4 How many homicides does Raleigh average per year? Durham? Chapel Hill?

5 Are highway contractors still working on repaving Interstate 40 westbound through Research Triangle Park?

6 Are your property taxes going up next year?

7 Is today your day to water the lawn (for people in Cary, Raleigh or places that buy water from Raleigh)?

I thought up the quiz one day while watching a local TV interview with a fellow who'd gotten a stiff fine, under Raleigh's new water restrictions, for running his sprinkler when it wasn't his turn.

"Nobody told me," he said.

This was before the city mailed out refrigerator magnets so water customers would have the rules in front of them.

Still, The News & Observer had published clip-and-save charts showing the right days for watering, and television had done its part.

People don't keep up with the news the way they used to, though. Recent studies document a decline in the portion of our population that reads or views news in any form, particularly among younger people.

We'll dig into this trend in an upcoming Q report, but I pondered this a few weeks ago while driving east on I-40 past a mile-long line of stopped westbound traffic.

Contractors were repaving those lanes. We had published extensive updates, traffic alerts and shortcut routes in the paper and on our Web site, but hundreds of cars had missed the news.

It occurred to me that the marketing folks at The N&O had truly captured our value with a recently adopted slogan: "Knowing is better."

Keeping up with local news, in print or online, can improve your personal life -- keep you right with the water police and clear of some traffic jams, for instance.

We've added a lot of useful information to the traditional "important" stuff we publish.

The important stuff, however, is what worries me as people skip the paper and news in general. Public-interest reporting, in The N&O and elsewhere, aims to support a vibrant democracy and community by arming people with information.

Many people seem content these days to let others do their thinking and deciding. Voting trends show this, as do levels of participation in various aspects of civic life.

A while back I spoke to a college class and posed this question: If there are two groups of people, and one group reads the paper and participates in debate and the other doesn't, which one will make the decisions?

Before "knowing is better" came another idea: "Knowledge is power."

The test for that isn't a news quiz, it's real life.