The Demise of the Newspaper

I never was a big fan of the newspaper. When I was little, I always connected the idea of the newspaper to my father and especially my grandfather. They would get up at the crack of dawn every morning and the first thing they would do would be to go outside, grab the news and sit in silence, reading. As a child, I never really understood the draw of sitting around, reading things that had nothing to do with us personally. My father always told me that it was a necessity to read the paper to know what was going on in the world. Now that I am older, I now see the importance of his advice but, one thing I still don't understand is the need for the actual newspaper.

In today's culture, the need for immediacy and convenience seems like a necessity in everything we do. This includes how we receive our news. The best way of satisfying this need is by posting the news on the internet via websites like the NewYorkTimes.com. Websites like these are taking the place of their paper counterparts for a handful of reasons. The main reason, I feel, that people are turning to electronic news rather than hardcopies is that electronic news is FREE! Just a Sunday-only subscription for 26 weeks of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is 52.00! Why would someone want to spend that kind of money when they could be getting that same information for free online. Not to mention, that same information, not just from JSOnline.com but, from tons of other news sources online.

Another reason for the switch from the paper to the "e-paper" is the sheer convenience factor. Instead of waiting for your newspaper to come once a day, you can check the news anytime you wants and also get the most recent and late-breaking news available. I find the online format of news way more appealing just for this reason but, others, like Paul Gillin who run websites like NewspaperDeathWatch.com, think otherwise.

Paul has worked in journalism for the past 17 years, 11 of which are primarily online journalism. The title of his blog site might make him sound excited for the decline of the newspaper but it is just the opposite. "Sadly, the economic foundation of these media scions is badly broken. The high fixed cost of print publishing makes the major metro newspaper business model unsustainable in a world that increasingly wants information to be free," says Paul in one of his blog posts. Even though he dislikes the bleak future of the newspaper, he does remain optimistic, "I’m an optimist, and I think the new journalism will be better in many ways than what preceded it. It’s just that getting there is going to hurt a lot."