My first job, aside from mowing neighbors’ lawns for extra money, was at a local amusement park sweeping trash. The routes I worked included a caricature stand, where artists would draw pictures of people that exaggerated their physical features. Will Smith and his dopy ears, Jay Leno and his jutting jaw, Mr. T and his overly furrowed brow. Mine happened to be drawn during my formative years, when my face hadn’t quite caught up in size with my ears and nose. And that’s exactly how the artist drew me: a human incarnate of Dumbo.

While these pictures have elements of truth to them (you can easily identify the subjects in the drawings), they don’t tell the whole story. They conflate reality with perception.

Every day on social media, however, political dialogue resembles something of “discourse,” but it’s little more than shouting matches between polar caricatures of belief. This is why opponents of same-sex marriage are perceived as anti-gay and hateful, and those in favor of strict gun control laws want to strip us of our freedom and our 32 oz Big Gulps.

I’m afraid it’s too late to steer the discourse surrounding same-sex marriage to something more agreeable. After all, how can you compete with a successfully executed propaganda campaign that makes no attempt to disguise its intent to completely shutdown all dialogue?

This doesn’t mean we can’t take steps to avoid the same hijacking of the gun control debate. After the public shooting in New York City today, with images of the mass shooting in the Aurora movie theater still fresh on our minds, both sides are going to come riding in on their high horses, trampling on the graves of victims, while making grand accusations of their opponents.

Caricatures can be fun, but as Mr. T would say — I “pity the fools” who think themselves warriors after battling in a field of straw men.

I spoke with a friend/journalism colleague late last week about digital media business models and my own foray into online community news, and brought up the Complete Community Connection, originally conceptualized by Steve Buttry. The local news website of the future will be the go-to source for all information related to that particular community. Why parse information and data between several local/mobile/app services when it can be organized neatly at a single destination?

One concern he brought up that got me thinking, and now writing, is that it may be best to do one thing well rather than a bunch of little things sub par. I didn’t ask him to clarify, and I should have, but I presume he meant the one thing that we [journalists] can do well is create content, and the other things would be to act as a community directory or commerce platform. But as Jeff Jarvis has long contended, the new media journalist’s role will evolve, and some may say already has, from gatekeeper to gate opener. To be enablers rather than producers. That is, to treat readers as collaborators rather than just a set of eyeballs. There’s more information flowing online than ever before, and the journalist’s role is to help sort and make sense of it.

That said, my team and I prefer to call the community news site we’re working on an “information-sharing platform,” as we don’t want to pigeonhole the information found there as simply “news.” The information visitors can find there will come in a variety of forms, and our aim, in addition to creating original content, is to act as curators that connect visitors with information most relevant to them: where they are. In that sense, we are providing a service beyond what city council members discussed at their latest meeting, and might include the nearest dining options that include search queries “margaritas + patio + within 5 miles of current location,” for example.

We’re expanding our role, to be sure, but we don’t think of it as trying to tackle “a bunch of little things.” It’s all information, and we want to make sense of it in as elegant and streamlined a fashion as possible.