Demise of Newspapers

     My first memory of reading a newspaper was when I was about six and was the Green Bay Packers Super Bowl season of 1996-1997. Every week I would always get the Wisconsin State Journal sports article and read all about the most recent game that week and then cut out the full-page picture of the player they chose that week. These covered my entire wall for a while. Since this time, newspapers have changed drastically. Like the Packers today, newspapers just aren’t the same anymore. Now instead of getting the paper thrown on your porch every morning, you are able to turn on your computer and within seconds open the newspaper online.
Newspapers have been in our country for centuries. A stereotypical scene of an American family having breakfast is everyone around the kitchen table and the father reading the daily newspaper. Is this being replaced with a laptop sitting on the table? Well there’s a good chance, according to an article in the Washington Post, U.S. newspapers have hit their lowest circulation in seven decades. This should come to no surprise considering everything else in our economy besides lottery tickets has been declining in the past year or two.
Now that most newspaper companies publish an online version of there paper, it has more or less killed the hard copy of the newspaper. This has come to no surprise to me that the newspaper is changing just like every other form of communication has. The newspapers just aren’t able to compete these days with Internet. People using the online versions are able to pick and chose what articles they want. They can look through the archives to look for old articles instead of looking in the old stack of newspapers and finding it. The Internet also provides colored pictures, links to related articles, or videos pertaining to the story. Everything about it is just a lot more convenient and easy to use.
Though there are many pros of using the Internet to read the news, it is a disadvantage for some advertisements. Hard copies of newspapers are filled with all assortments of ads. People who read the news online filter out certain content and never will read certain ads or stories.
I guess in today’s age, it’s safe to say that online papers are killing the traditional newspapers that have been in our country for centuries. But as today’s world changes so does the newspaper industry.