When I was working on the high school newspaper, one big thing we always encouraged the younger writers to do is highlight different angles of all the stories in the news. It was never about disputing the original article, but rather exploring another side to it. That’s kind of how Joseph Harris defined countering. He claims, “to counter is not to nullify but to suggest a different way of thinking.” To find an example of countering, it’s perhaps the easiest to immediately turn to the editorial section on a credible news site.
Facebook and journalism have become somewhat of a cliched pair at this point. Facebook has become one of those view things that you can talk about and almost everyone knows what you’re talking about. There’s so many articles and posts about Facebook all over the web and most of them are pretty boring to read because we’ve seen them all before.
But, while surfing the online paper for the Star Tribune (the main newspaper for my home, Minneapolis), I read an editorial on why there’s suddenly a decline in Facebook usage and I found it pretty interesting. It’s called, “The trouble with Facebook is the people,” and it’s about how we’re not using Facebook as often because we’re realizing that people are just boring. I’ve read tons of articles and blog posts on the topic of Facebook but I only really enjoy reading one if it is something unique. That’s the whole idea of countering: to put a fresh spin on a hackneyed story.
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