In recent years, America has seen a rapid decline in newspapers, especially local, across the country.
According to Sara Fischer at Axios, newspapers have been vanishing on an average rate of two per week and America has 6.4 percent of counties without local news. This could be due to a rapid increase in the use of technology in the modern world. It has become easier and less costly to simply use the internet for current events.
Due to this, many take printed newspapers for granted despite the fact that they can improve literacy by building vocabulary, especially for kids, and can even affect the outcome of elections. Newspapers have been shown to help increase literacy and keep people accurately informed about politics and current events.
On the other hand, news on the internet can often be false or misleading because of what Kirk Folger of Folger Graphics, who prints The Crusader, calls “online egos,” or people who simply want the attention and are not necessarily writing the truth for their readers.This loss moves journalists closer to people pleasing rather than writing about concerning topics.
Journalism teacher Susan Sutton said, “We need journalists to research what’s going on and to let everybody know, otherwise people can just live their lives without ever knowing important events whether they are good or bad.”
Newspapers are expected to print only the truth to their readers and are held accountable when they mislead or misinformed their readers. They are a reliable source of information that gives power to the public.
The decrease in newspapers also affects the stories they publish, and the fewer newspapers, the less people are able to understand situations in the world around them as newspapers make facts digestible to the readers.
Newspapers also promote emotions and feelings of nostalgia to their readers. Readers including Dean of Academics Diana Assereto and Folger remember the “Pink section” of a newspaper where there were movie reviews, horoscopes, and book reviews, and how the cartoon made the reading more enjoyable.
Having paper copies of newspapers gives a view of events in someone’s lifetime, as Assereto put it, “Having it in print represents a piece of history.”
