Extra Extra! Read All About it, the Newspaper is Dying, and We're Gonna Shout it!

When I was just a little boy, I used to pretend that I was a sports writer for Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. My first dream was to be an athlete, but my second was to be a journalist and write for the hometown newspaper. I used to play a game of my Madden NFL video game, and when I was finished, I used to write a "sports" article about what happened in the game. I included stats, season outlooks, and even quotes that I made up in my head. My parents still have a few of the copies of my "work." But a lot has changed since those days.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is no longer a newspaper that is thriving financially. In fact, there really aren't ANY newspapers in our country that are thriving financially. Like a lot of other areas in our society, the internet has taken control of the media industry. According to The Demise of the Newspaper Industry, a 2009 article posted by dividendgrowthinvestor.com, "the newspaper industry has been hit hard by increased online competition and the economic crisis." Internet news websites offer most (if not all) of the characteristics of the traditional newspaper, but also add a few benefits of their own. For example, most news websites are free to look at, and might offer video clips of a story rather than ONLY text like a newspaper. But perhaps the greatest benefit of online news is its element of timeliness; perhaps the most important part of any news company. The main function of a news company is to bring its patrons the newsworthy stories as quickly as possible, and the internet offers the ability to post a story or video as soon as it happens, whereas a newspaper would have to wait until the next morning to bring its subscribers the news.

According to Extra! Extra! Are Newspapers Dying?, an articled posted by USAtoday.com, nearly 67% of homes in America have some type of internet connection, and it is hard to imagine that that number won't do anything but increase over time. As long as people have the internet, they have the opportunity to access national news websites and even many local ones; most of which are offered for free. Not only do we possess the ability to access local news such as JSonline, AND national news sites such as CNN or Foxnews, but we possess the ability to do it for free, which is a welcomed word in THIS economy.

I haven't quite changed all that much since when I was a little boy. I mean, I don't still write articles about what happened in my video game. I do, however, still dream to be a sports writer. The only difference between then and now (besides the video game thing) is that when I picture myself writing for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, I picture my friends and family searching for my articles on JSonline.