The times, they are a-changin,' day after day

In an offhand moment, one of our copy editors offered one of the best ideas I've heard for demonstrating what's happening with the stock market these days: A flip book of traders' faces changing from day to day.

One day the grim downcast stare into space, the next an ecstatic and gleeful grin. That followed by the pall of hopelessness and that by a victorious cheer.

Maybe we could put a small, separate image in the lower right-hand corner of every page of the paper one day and you could shuffle through them with your thumb, watching the dramatic changes flicker from mood to mood like the images of an old silent movie. It really would be funny. In a frightening sort of way.

It would also illustrate a characteristic of news reporting that we don't talk about much - its frustrating impermanence.

We like to think of the course of human events as images frozen in time - Remember the Maine, World War II ends, Kennedy wins, Nixon resigns. Clinton impeached, The twin towers collapse. "That's the way it is," as Walter Cronkite use to sign off the CBS News lo, these many years ago.

But today's front page is never quite so limited, really. It always leads to tomorrow's, which may be something else altogether different.

The Onion's unparalleled newspaper satire, "Our Dumb Century," which chronicles the 20th century through a succession of imaginary front pages, demonstrates this with some financial "reporting" of its own. On Oct. 22, 1929, the paper's headline reads: "Stock Market Invincible. 'Buy, Buy, Buy!' Experts Advise." Then, adjacent to that on the very next page for Oct. 23, 1929, the paper cries out in huge type: "Pencils For Sale. Stock Market Crashes"

These days, that juxtaposition may hit just a little too close to home, but viewed from the distance of time, it is a classic demonstration of the transitory nature of what we refer to in professional parlance as the news cycle.

Of course, that cycle, we all know well now, is no longer measured in 24-hour increments. "Time marches on!" as the old newsreel once declared, and the procession now can be watched streaming endlessly by on the World Wide Web.

So, this morning's picture of urgent worry morphs into this afternoon's sigh of welcome relief, and the cycle runs on endlessly. But there is still a need for us to periodically stop and take stock of the events we're caught up in. What, I sometimes wonder, would people use as keepsakes for the major events in their lives if they relied entirely on the constantly changing Web for information? Would screen shots of the Cubs' World Series victory celebration cut it? Into what memory box could you put the day's edition of the paper to remind you years hence what all was happening on the day peace was declared in the Mideast, for real?

Yes, the moods on Wall Street are changing these days faster than almost anyone can keep up, and there's a grim pleasure in considering how it would look to mash up the daily images and let them all run together like some speeded-up Charlie Chaplin scene. But fleeting as a day's images may be, we still need to take stock and reflect on them, in order to fully understand them and know best how to move them to the next frame.

For that, thankfully, we still have a front page.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.