As more newspapers fall to the economy and disinterest, the tragedy grows
Angela Bladwin
Staff Reporter
Cutting down employees, less home delivery, fewer pages, less types of stories and even shutting completely down; this is what has been happening to America’s newspapers. If this trend keeps going there will be some unforeseen consequences for our society and our day-to-day lives.
Newspapers have been one of the tools that we the people have used to make sure our government, federal and local, are acting in an uncorrupt manner. If many of these smaller town newspapers go under, how are the people of that town going to find out about local affairs?
I know that I would want to have the ability to find out what my mayor is doing. Without these newspapers keeping an eye on things, the government inadvertently gets more power because they do not have to worry so much about being covered by local media. As a result, they could easily take corrupt action without being caught.
Another scary prospect of financially struggling newspapers is the cutting down of foreign affairs coverage. According to Paul Starr of the New Republic, “At many papers, foreign coverage was one of the first things to go,” and that “the number of American newspaper correspondents abroad dropped 30 percent between 2002-2006.” I cannot even imagine what the numbers are now with the recession!
This lack of foreign coverage scares me because the world is filled with uncertainty with the problems of the Middle East, etc. I want to know what is going on internationally, and as the amount of American coverage of these affairs decreases, I get scared. I don’t want to be in a state where I am not sure of what is going on in the world.
Coverage of Washington is being cut down; this causes trouble because Congress and other areas of government will not be as closely monitored (New Republic). It will be easier for them to pass bills that we won’t immediately know about.
The breadth of stories is disappearing; features like book reviews are being cut. This is sad because what I always liked about newspapers is the variety inside; there is something for everyone. Broadcast news only covers a few topics in one segment, but the newspapers have a huge bundle of material (New Republic).
Now I know that the current recession has been playing a large role in this disaster but even before then, newspapers were going along the Internet route. To me, as the web news becomes easier to access by a wide range of people, the reading of print newspapers is going to drop even lower.
Even though the web may be easier, it can have consequences for the papers. First of all if they don’t charge to read the online paper and they are losing revenue for their print paper, how could the journalists make money? It would probably fail because journalists need a job that pays. If they start charging online reading, then people could easily just go onto websites such as CNN.com that do not charge, and the newspapers would just lose readership (New Republic).
Lastly, the web versions of papers end up severely dividing the news readers and the non-news readers (New Republic). These are the people who only would look at the comics or puzzles in newspapers but still would see what is going on news wise; now they can completely avoid news on the web. As a result, their knowledge of politics and world affairs is very low. Print newspapers seemed to help even the apathetic know what was going on in the world.
Not only will the apathetic have lowered world-awareness from the disappearance of print news, ignorance of politics on the local, national, and international levels will affect everyone?even die-hard newspaper readers.