Intelligence has a diminished bearing on economic prosperity. Employers are shedding workers by the price-tag regardless of merit, experience, or potential. If business revenues fall off a cliff the first instinct is survival, not productivity. This opens the door to a renewed emphasis on “Creativity,” which implies less investment in goods, and more emphasis on making something from nothing. Call it “Doing.” In our new economy either you do something that resonates, or you don’t.

The type of information within traditional newspapers no longer offers a foundation, or antidote, to economic turmoil, defeat or underemployment. The last bastion where newspaper-type information survives is within banking and investments, it’s always been a necessity, and The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg continue to prosper. But “news” for the sake of broadening our horizon, adding to our intelligence, as found in the New York Times, or Denver Post, Philadelphia Inquirer? What for? Once our economy hit the wall our attentions sought useful, short-term, solutions, antidotes and answers (call them bits). These bits could be drawn from all over, no longer requiring a centralized newspaper to deliver them. Google stepped in with a platform to match this need.

Still, even with Google’s services, we continue to realize the futility of “news” as the primary intelligence we rely upon to succeed. More jobs are lost and businesses close regardless of how much we are learning through traditional channels. That’s not the fault of the newspapers, or is it? Should newspaper have changed their model to provide the news in a more useful manner to their audiences to help us make better decisions about our economic survival (as they promise to protect us from the wrongdoings of government)? Maybe, but what seems to have happened is we shifted our behavior to find what provides us with truly useful information while allowing us a little levity about our circumstances. Gawker gains traffic on The New York Times by magnifying the absurdity of our surroundings (the Onion too). HuffPost provides intelligence from “Doers.” Reality TV keeps on trucking. (What would I do without Anthony Bourdain!)

Most importantly, we held up a collective mirror and invested our lives within Social Networks. We are sharing and displaying our “Doing,” investing these doings into our lives. If the newspaper, our former intelligence-leader, can’t offer us the information to support us, then we’ll find this information where it lives. Via Social Media we search through our lives, whether it’s Reality TV, Facebook Newsfeeds, or Twitter conversations, to find the right answers, and are attracted to the individuals who are “Doing” things; making their prosperity by creating it versus earning it.

Through this search we hope to find a new path to survival/success, a new foundation. We need new information, the type newspapers don’t currently provide.

(Image on home page from USDA Forestry Service)