Ten years ago, anywhere you went in the morning you would see a handful of people reading the paper, reading about what they missed yesterday, catching up on what happened while they were asleep, and seeing what today holds.
Not anymore.
Now, it’s actually uncommon to see people with newspapers in their hands. People don’t read newspapers much, but are somehow still informed on current events.
iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Kindles have replaced them. What a shame, right? Wrong.
Print enthusiasts can rant and rave about the quality of professional journalism all they want. They can claim that late-breaking news, when not spelled correctly and when it doesn’t follow the Associated Press Stylebook, is not newsworthy or fit to print. But when it’s what the general populations wants and is reading, who’s an editor or journalist to argue?
‘The fact of the Internet is that there are no more gatekeepers. Information and knowledge are now virtually free to everyone,’ commenter Dustin Sanchez said in response to Jared Luck’s article, ‘Internet threatens learning process,’ which ran in The Daily Cougar on Nov. 17.
But is this a bad thing? Sure, having a bevy of information at your fingertips can be problematic in the sense that it can sometimes dissuade people from learning anything.
Why bother when you could just look it up, right? But that doesn’t mean the Internet’s ability to constantly inform, update and entertain is negative. It can be, but should so many disregard its endless possibilities because of the idiocy of so many?
Heroin, for example, a synthetic morphine, was introduced as something like Demerol, which serves as an anesthetic.
Great inventions can be used for terrible things, but just because some people abuse prescription drugs doesn’t mean all drugs should be outlawed. They can also help people, and the Internet can too. Print media can create an identity, a brand for itself via the Internet.
‘According to the State of the News Media 2009 report, this year’s end will mark 25 percent (more than 14,000) cuts in newspaper jobs since 2001. But that’s a modest estimate; the morbid layoff news aggregator Paper Cuts has tallied up more than 14,571 jobs lost in 2009 alone,’ The Daily Bruin’s Kia Makarechi’ wrote in a Nov. 4 editorial. ‘Time is running out for print journalism, and it would be tragic if its biggest champions put themselves six feet under by refusing to adapt.’
Young people have had enough of the shame-campaign intended to motivate them to purchase and read the print versions of newspapers through sappy, ‘poor-me’ tactics. But young people are online and that isn’t going to change.
So the older crowd who is attached to tangible papers can sob, journalists can fret and groan and young people will continue to get their news from their handheld devices. Get over it, Rupert Murdoch; print media must adapt to survive.
Matthew Keever is a communication junior and may be reached at [email protected]
