e utopia Principles
News about a Good Place
It’s good to have news about a Good Place. Not just who won the election, what blew up, what caught on fire, what crimes were committed and so on. These kind of stories attract attention but do little or nothing to help us build up a Good Place. On the other hand, news about people, activities, organizations, plans that are aiming at building up Good Places are very helpful. They describe the field of play and the action. They inform us about groups, process, activities that we can join to help build up Good Places. The authors of The One Minute Manager say that “Feedback is the Breakfast of Champions.” They surmise that, if bowling alleys hoisted sheets so that you couldn’t see your bowling ball as it rolled down the lane, no one would bowl. The visual feedback of seeing the ball you rolled achieve its objective (to some degree, you hope) keeps you in the game. What feedback do we get about building up Good Places? Very little from standard news sources. The way we report news that helps build up a Good Place is a little bit different than journalism as practiced generally. In order to offer an example of news about a Good Place we started the Good Place Akron report, accessible at www.goodplaceakron.com.
Discussion Questions
News about our community: who is our neighbor? How much effort do we need to to exert to find out if anyone is hurt on the road to Jericho?
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