Future of newspapers needs local support

By Sean McBeath     2/12/09 6:00pm

In the midst of the current financial crisis, we hear story after story about the loss of jobs and Wall Street bailouts. But we are facing another threat that goes largely unnoticed. While banks and the Big Three - General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler - crowd around Congress to gather the remains of our tax money, printed publications are going silently into the night, as newspapers and magazines watch their advertising revenues disappear.It is a trend that started years ago with the invention of online classifieds, which have been siphoning away business from the historical cash-cows of the newspaper world. It has been a slow process, to be sure, but one soundly documented over the last decade. The most recently publicized event demonstrating the fall of the print media giants has to be The New York Times' decision to sell advertising space on its front page for the first time in over 150 years.

For most of us, it is not an issue that causes concern. Our generation is already accustomed to receiving all of our current event information from television and internet sources. As far as we are concerned, these sources are more convenient, and that makes them better. But our reliance on these "broadcast" media sources makes us vulnerable in ways that will only become apparent when print media is truly a thing of the past.

The failure of the newspaper industry opens up the door for a number of issues concerning the institutional memory of our entire species. Without the permanence of the printed word to keep them honest, what is to keep our news sources from entering an Orwellian mindset, in which - as sole proprietors of our worldly information - they feel no responsibility to maintain the integrity of our history?

---

---

While this is a dire prediction for the future of news, and one that seems far-fetched, it is closer than we might like to think. There is already evidence that Fox News has changed online transcripts of The O'Reilly Factor after subsequent criticism revealed factual errors in Bill O'Reilly's arguments.

A more likely outcome is that we will simply see a dissolution of reliable media sources. An easy exercise to imagine a future without newspapers is to imagine our campus without the Thresher. There are a lot of ways to get news without reading this paper, but how much would you trust it?

Nine years ago, when Time ranked the most important events of the millenium, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press was unanimously voted first. Now, with the rise of the internet, we face a choice: Will we allow the 500-year tradition of the printed word to fall to the wayside in favor of less permanent, but more accessible, information?

Since it seems unlikely that the government will deem the printed word as valuable as the banking and automobile industries, the onus is on us to support local papers. Giants like The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, helped by global readership, will weather this recession considerably better than local papers. So, if you care about the integrity of your news, I encourage you to buy a subscription to your hometown paper, or even just send a donation. It may be years or decades away, but it seems inevitable that without a change in the way we prioritize our news sources, the newspaper industry is going to collapse. And who knows what will happen then.

Sean McBeath is a Martel College junior and former Thresher calendar editor.

---