There must be something magical about the logic of news reporting today. The humor lies in the concept of free news that solely relies on advertisement for funding. The Internet monopolist movement seduced the general public with cheap, on-demand illusions of information.’
How is it logical that obtaining interactively updated news, plus more, should not be worth more than your typical daily newspaper prints? What started this backward ideology?’
Signs of the paperless newspaper replacing prints go back to the acceptance and widespread public use of the Internet in the ’90s.’ The lure of the new medium called the Internet offered a combination of easy access and searchable databases filled with minute-by-minute reporting. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, this newfound freedom poses further insecurities to the molding of new educational minds.
‘When the PKU disease experiments were first published, we ran to the library to read about it,’ Phillip Snider, an associate professor in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, said. ‘Kids these days have it so much easier.”
The easiness he referred to is the main threat.’
In this downturn of the century, online journalism trapped the news industry in a maze as publishers relied more on advertising as a primary revenue source. If online edition customer bases shrunk, online advertisers would be upset and demand lower rates, thus driving the publishers to approach predatory methods in providing news. Predatory journalism in turn targets the public’s interest in entertainment.’
True, the traditional newspaper is becoming less appealing, but alternate sources have become less informative. Blurring of traditional lines between news and opinion and news and entertainment places more emphasis on worthless news as opposed to world or political news. Television, for example, does not provide an alternative at all. The news channels are now devout worshippers, covering celebrities, crimes and miscellaneous social trivia. The so-called political programs only provide opinions of extremists who have enough money to be heard. There are few resources and even less commitment to covering significant news beyond floods and fires. Events in the Gaza Strip go widely unreported in the news while the death of Anna Nicole Smith was forced upon the public for over two months.
It is late to propose a solution for the news industry to change, and doing so would be tough.
Newspapers are still the preferred medium, but they are not entirely convenient in this day and age. The reason any of this matters has little to do with free or charged news. The real threat is to the future of reliable news in the world around us.’
Quality journalism is disappearing. Newspapers, whose reporting staffs still produce most of the news, are no longer financially viable. Maybe refraining from reading Yahoo’s Red-Carpet Dress Disaster and searching for quality news can keep this generation’s mind stimulated with domestic and world news.
