Growing up in the suburbs of Milwaukee, I can’t remember a Sunday when my parents wouldn’t spend the day reading the Journal Sentinel. They read it to find out current sports highlights, classifieds, politics, even movie times; now when I think of looking for all of these things, I immediately look on the internet. Even when I moved out of my parents’ house, it never dawned on me that I wouldn’t receive the Sunday paper anymore; to me the thick, heavy paper just seems to be a waste of space when everything I need is just a few clicks away on my laptop.
According to The New Yorker, “only 19% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 even look at a newspaper.” This brings my next point: the younger the average American becomes, the less and less they will be using the newspaper as their primary source of information. With the internet becoming more accessible to the average person, the less there will be a need for a newspaper. Also, according to The New Yorker, the current average age of a newspaper reader is 54 and rising. Soon these generations will no longer exist and either will the newspaper.
According to Marc Orchant, a guest blogger of Business Network, he claims that by the time he opens a newspaper, everything inside it instantly becomes old news. This seems almost inevitably true. With the use of search engines such as Google or online classifieds such as Craigslist, looking for information online essentially becomes FASTER and CHEAPER. With the help of Google narrowing your search for you compared to digging through the pages of newspaper, a newspaper seems to become too much work for the younger generations. Also, who wants to go out and pay extra for information we can find for free online? With this instant gratification of the internet we are all used to as young Americans, it just doesn’t make sense to use old technologies (newspapers). Personally, I can’t remember the last time I have looked through a newspaper and I believe that someday there will be a day when we all remembered what a newspaper was.
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Newspapers are still around and I'm already starting to think of them as something that once existed!
ReplyDeleteThinking about newspapers, many people just see them as sources of information set out by a certain person or a group of people once a day. Obviously, this is not a very reliable source of information in the world we live in today. News breaks multiple times within a day and people want to know about it, so unless newspapers are reprinting whenever something new happens, they will go out of business.
The internet is taking over because it can be changed and updating on a hourly, daily, monthly, or any kind of basis needed. Not only does it keep its viewers updated but it also gives multiple sides of a story because it is open for anyone to say anything. Silverblatt talks about the objectivity and point of view of a writer in his text. He says that journalists are in a position to "present the ideal Truth, without distortion or personal bias," (224) but that is extremely hard for one newspaper journalist to do. With the internet being so open, no one has to worry about not getting the ideal Truth because they can get any opinion they want by just the click of a button.