Traditionally, what we in the news business do is cover what happened yesterday.

Things that happen every day are, frankly, what we in the news business aren't good at covering because there is no one day in which they are news.

We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.

For all Trump's criticisms of government, his family wealth came from feeding at the government trough. His father, Fred Trump, leveraged government housing programs into a construction business; the empire was founded on public money.

The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.

I was the first blogger on the Times's website. That happened during the Iraq war, when I wanted an outlet for the things I was seeing every day that couldn't fit into just two columns a week. Then I became interested in using multimedia, specifically as a way to engage young people.