Newspapers Won't Fail

With every new information medium, we hear gloomy predictions about the demise of newspapers. First radio was going to be culprit, then TV, and now the Internet. The new medium is easier to access and digest, and will soon replace the worn-out, boring newspapers, the experts predict. But newspapers won't be replaced anytime soon. Why? Without newspapers, TV and the Internet wouldn't have any news. Board of Trustees meetings are usually long and tedious, for the most part, and are not fit for today's "on-the-go," superficial news consumer. So our more "fast-paced" news outlets, like TV, were absent for a good portion of the proceedings, while The Vanguard and Press-Register were there throughout. Missed by the TV stations was the extensive discussion about the tuition increase on the first day of the Board meeting. Apparently, that's not worth their time. Even worse, once they did show up, the proceedings didn't even seem to be newsworthy to them. A "reporter" from one of the stations didn't even take notes. Instead, he had the article about the tuition increase from that morning's Press-Register in his hand, using it as his source of information. But that's not all. The TV reporters present had so little respectthat their cell phones went off not once but twice during the meeting. Some things are apparently more important than the story to the "on-the-beat" TV reporter. Maybe if they had been there at the beginning of the meeting when a Board member told everyone to silence their phones, they wouldn't have been so disrespectful. The product, though, demonstrates the effects of shoddy journalism more vividly. NBC 15's broadcast on the tuition increase promises in its teaser to show how the students feel about it. When it comes time to interview students, the "reporter" seemed to just grab the first two young-looking people available. At the meeting they just happened to be Glenn Gardner, who was identified as a "senior," and Gregory Bettis. These weren't just "man-on-the-street" comments from John Q. Student, though. Gardner represents the student body as the SGA president, while Bettis is the attorney general. Far from being meaningless, these titles actually impact the story, so they're worth mentioning. Further, two local TV stations relied on the Associated Press's account of the meeting, instead of writing their own on their Web sites. Like TV, Web sites often rely on newspapers to do their reporting, too. At The Raw Story, an online alternative publication, every single story on today's page uses a newspaper as its main source. We will always have newspapers as long as TV and Web news outlets can't do their own journalism. Switching mediums shouldn't mean a change in journalistic standards. TV, Internet and newspapers should adhere to the same values as to what constitutes news and how to report it. There's nothing sacred about newsprint in and of itself. In fact, personally, it's pretty annoying when my hands get black from reading a newspaper, so I get my news from the online or Kindle versions of newspapers. Although it doesn't seem to be the trend, TV and Internet news should be just as in-depth and relevant as newsprint, not an inferior product because of the medium. We should all be journalists.