The rapidly disappearing daily newspaper, the new victim of progress,
The rapidly disappearing daily newspaper, the new victim of progress, will be missed!
A recent news broadcast on a cable news station announced that the daily newspaper is a rapidly fading medium. The newspaper firms can no longer make enough money to keep the presses rolling. The Internet and the prevalence of televisions throughout the world have brought the daily newspaper down. Daily newspaper journalists are getting the dreaded ‘pink slip’, forced to vacate their desks, put up their note pads put their pencils in their box. A television news room is their best future job hope, with an Internet blog probably their alternate destiny. Crusty chief editors are looking for work in photocopy stores, and printing press operators are enrolling in retraining programs. The daily newspaper will soon become an artifact, a museum piece, an example of how people got their news before television and the Internet.
Besides being deprived of this pleasant morning ritual, there’s other fallout. What’s going to happen to the newspaper stand vendor? Where will all those youngsters, our news paper delivery kids go to make some money for college? Will coffee shops report, via televisions, to inform the morning crowd, or will they have a stack of PC notebooks tied to their WI-FI to hand out to breakfasters so they can read the daily news on an Internet page? Will Dad have to bring the laptop to the morning breakfast table to read the newspaper – without the paper? What will we use to swat flies, or to line the kitty’s box? What will you set the dog’s food on, sans yesterday’s newspaper? When you move, you won’t be able to wrap your glasses and dishes and other breakables in the commonly used old newspaper for the task. You’ll have to buy a couple of rolls of expensive bubble wrap. Now you’ll have to use real kindling to start a fire. The beloved newspaper is more than news to us. Your daily newspaper is a reusable resource. Recycle when you’re done and do something for the environment not any more!
Some say that the newspaper is not disappearing, only big corporate ownership of newspapers. Now, as the major newspaper of a major metropolitan city disappears, ten others will spring up to take its place. They’ll probably be focus specific, such as political or special interest papers, papers with a slant. The daily newspaper will be news as seen from the Pacifist Viewpoint, the Daily Socialist, the Fifth Street Quaker Daily Review. Having low sales and financing for a desktop publishing system, these papers will probably not even be dailies, but weekly or monthly reviews. Maybe someone with money in that city where the daily paper has disappeared, will be willing to fund a daily newspaper on humanitarian grounds.
The daily newspaper is disappearing, but the replacement isn’t so bad either. True, we won’t be improving our reading skills much, but television and Internet news is multimedia. You may even get to see the news live. Daily papers are available online now, from nearly every country, with many of them translated into English. The march of technology is unstoppable. The ‘old fashioned’ paper newspaper will soon be a thing of the past. We’ll miss you, daily newspaper, and we’ll surely enjoy you until the last hurrah!
