Don’t look now, but newspapers as you know them are dying. The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Breeze, and The Trailblazer are at the front of the line for the firing squad, and it’s taking a while. In the meantime, they’re writing their last wills and testaments, figuratively at least.
The decline can mostly be attributed the Internet. When it first came out, very few journalists thought it wouldn’t last, much less flourish the way it has today, and that is a main reason newspapers are suffering today.
Because they didn’t place much importance on it, they didn’t find a need to change much, sticking to their old ways and refusing to adapt to the changing times.
Unfortunately for them, this new resource has taken the forefront from them. At a recent journalism workshop at USC (see last month’s issue) a staggering majority of student journalists claimed to not regularly read any type of periodical. Even more said they get most of their news from none other than the Internet. Nowadays, most if not all newspapers have a website and even an iPhone application, but that won’t be enough to save the print.
All blame can’t be placed on the Internet, though. Newspapers themselves have been signing their own death warrants for decades. By siding with one side or another, they proved themselves to be biased and unreliable, for the most part.
Those that have been impartial have always been dominated by the big corporations and thrown out of business.
A little strange box came out called “the television,” which didn’t require people to get a subscription.
It, like the Internet, has allowed people to find out what’s going on around the world without leaving the comfort of their own couches. Therefore, print journalism is a dying breed.
Now that’s not to say that it had it coming or it’s a good thing. It is neither of these in any shape, way, or form. Could it have changed or “improved?” Yes. Did it? No, although it has tried. And boy, it has. So far, it’s stayed afloat.
Most newspapers today, if not all of them, have a website, because if anything doesn’t have a website, it comes from the Victorian Age.
Some newspapers, like The Guardian, now even have a Twitter.
The moment print journalism dies; it will be a day of great mourning. Since the beginning of time, stories were retold by the spoken word. When print followed, it was inexplicable.
Centuries of information were now available to readers. For centuries more, newspapers were the only way people got information from all over the world. For journalist collectively, it is the fall of the original pillar of journalism.
Possibly the only way this is positive is in that it would help advance technological journalism, like blogs, podcasts, and websites.
Leading the forefront of this movement is Google, which collects news from all major news outlets, a majority from newspapers, and posts them for free. This practice makes these periodicals lose money, as they lose revenue from advertisers and print subscriptions alike.
The only thing we can do now is watch, and hope print rises out from itself like a phoenix, ready to take the world over again.