Is the Daily Newspaper an Anachronism?

Published on August 13, 2004 By Gideon MacLeish In Misc

I was wondering this question today as I was contemplating the role of print media versus "real time" news. Almost everyone I know gets their news from cable TV or the internet; I get all my headline news from reliable net news sources, my weather from a compendium of sources including the local radio (weatherchannel.com tends to be less reliable for my area of the country), and my sports via yahoo! sports and espn.com.

Fortunately for us, our local paper concentrates on city and county issues, and leaves the state and national news to bigger papers. This gives it a nice little niche market, and thus, viability. But the bigger city papers are usually owned by a small number of companies, and the stories contained therein tend to be virtually identical. Why? Because they're the "canned" news stories pulled off the press wire, stripped of accountability and credit for a well written article through their anonymity. They tend to be accurate, if not always possessing of a bias, however, they're not especially timely in light of the realtime news access most of us have. Because they are "old news", they have a higher standard; something has to set them apart to make the reader WANT the newspaper.

I hope the daily newspaper doesn't fade into the sunset. But I'm seriously wondering about its viability in light of recent technological developments.

signing off,

Gideon MacLeish

Comments

historyishere

on Aug 14, 2004

Sometimes faster isn't necessarily better. Its good sometimes to have an entity do a bit of digesting of events before presenting them to you, and I think in this respect, newspapers have the advantage. They can take a bit more time to make sure they generally have the facts right.

I also like the fact that once you have a newspaper, its harder to change the facts it contains to suit the desires of national or corporate policy like some other media(the internet for instance). Even though it is somewhat disposable, it does seem to lend some permanence to facts and stories, so I hope that newspapers never really die out.

Gideon MacLeish

on Aug 14, 2004

You make some good points, history...and I, too hope newspapers aren't a dying medium. Sadly, though, a lot of people rely on the news they get on the internet (which is the ultimate medium for Orwellian manipulation...facts that are there one minute...are gone the next).

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