News-Record.com

Driving into work this morning, I caught all the lights and didn't grit my teeth at a single cellphone-talking driver. That's because the roads into downtown were close to deserted. It reflects the news environment on the last week of the year, routinely the nine or 10 slowest news days of the year.

People are doing what they should be doing: vacationing, spending time with family, cocooning with sports on TV. Meanwhile, government runs with a skeletal crew; elected bodies don't meet. Businesses aren't doing much, other than finishing budgets and planning employee performance sessions. Thank goodness for death and destruction.

Wait. That didn't come out right.

Yet the paper still comes out every day. The Web site still publishes all day. But with little news, what goes in them?

While it may sound counter-intuitive -- and maybe it is -- the lack of traditional news isn't a bad thing. Newspapers and television are forced to become enterprising. We don't chase the same stories because there are fewer of them to chase. The result, for us at least, is that there's more time to do different stories and, I hope, unique stories. Less government-based coverage tends to mean more people-based coverage. We can look ahead and speculate and look back with authority. We can use the time to find interesting people who do interesting things and catch up on stories that we knew about but just didn't have the time to get to. And there's always time for the serendipitous.

So, if it is hard news you want, it's probably a good time to take a rest from the news. You won't find much of it anywhere, unless you're particularly interested in news from other parts of the world or small bore political items.

Reading the paper -- the Web site less so -- is a different experience during these 10 days. A good thing, I think.