In the earliest days of the pandemic, I was ravenous for news, reading every article, watching every press briefing, furiously browsing the Internet for answers.

It took weeks for this to slow down and finally stop, took me realizing I couldn’t keep up with the barrage of new information if I tried to put an end to a frenzy of my own creation.

Not being able to keep up with everything was true of the pandemic.

And it’s true of news of the war in Ukraine, of updates on the supply chain and the price of gas, of bills moving ahead in legislatures across the nation that could have devastating effects on education, on moves being made right here in New York, here in Sullivan County, here in the town I call home.

Few of us can pay attention to it all, at least not in any substantive way.

Time gets in the way, jobs and families and errands and sleep. We need to keep functioning as human beings, and it tends to get in the way of developing overnight expertise on the latest developing controversy or crisis.

Few of us can both be well-versed on the workings of NATO and the UN and on the intricacies of cryptocurrency. Fewer still have time to attend government meetings and tune into press conferences unless doing so is what they do for a living.

And that’s just what makes those people who do it for a living so precious to us in this country, where a free press exists and journalists are able not just to cover all the sorts of things we as citizens cannot keep up with but they’re also able to become experts in those subjects.

Journalists build up substantial knowledge on their respective beats — be it local news or medical technology, hockey or the stock market.

They do all this work for us, so that we don’t have to read a college courseload’s worth of information to stay abreast of the news in the world, so we can go to work in the morning and come home at night and still be aware that somewhere something or other is happening.

We cannot keep track of it all.

But fortunately, we don’t have to.

Journalists, real journalists, are doing it for us.