News flash. The newspaper industry is dying and with it, I fear, journalism. Less and less people are tuning into the local news and 24-hour news has taken over the way people view the world. America has progressed to the point where it is not enough to read about what happened, we have to get an alert when the future is happening now.
The heart and soul of publishing has always been writing, but its blood is advertising, especially in mass production. The massive cost for materials, printing and transportation began to outweigh the revenue from sales and instead of trying to up the cost of words on a page to John Q. Public the industry tapped into advertising. Renting their bodies and becoming a carrier for advertisers to now penetrate the homes of millions of consumers.
The problems started the moment the news left the printed page and jumped onto the glowing screens. The glowing screens sat in our houses, our offices and our laps. The glowing screens were everywhere. The news now came to us; we no longer had to go to the news. Also there was less garbage, less recycling, just less. That’s what America is, more for less, or in this case, less for less.
Advertising and cost are main concerns but I would argue that the real killer of print and ultimately journalism as a whole is the philosophical change America made from demanding quality reporting to get the whole truth, to sacrificing quality in order to get some truth as soon as possible. The real reason 24-hour news has become so popular is the networks ability to pass off speculation as news. Journalism happens in several stages and it is very rarely instantaneous. There is fact checking, source verification and the arranging of information so as not to be misleading or trivial. The reporting of news is only one step in the process of informing the public. Reporting the news takes up only a fraction of the time in a news program so 24-hour networks fill the extra time with analysis. The problem with this is that only a small amount of news needs to be analyzed passed its original reporting. This is where the real genius of hyper journalism comes into play, when a story is rushed through the journalistic process to the news floor the story comes in broken pieces instead of one fluid entity. This allows the anchors and “experts” to try and predict what direction the story will take.
The 24-hour networks then try and create news of their own by speculating on the events they have reported. Why waste time on a news show that only informs you of the past when there are programs creating a future for you, right in front of your eyes, that you can use to decide how to live and vote and think? This is where journalism will die. We as a people are so time consumed that we are moving closer and closer to the abandonment of fact altogether and the embrace of an educated guess. If we do not decide to hold our information gatekeepers responsible for dealing in fact instead of speculation and demand quality reporting today, then journalism has no future in the world of tomorrow. With no reliable source to aid in discovering the truth, we will have no choice but to accept what the gatekeepers present as important and will continue to be susceptible to fear mongering that is based on shallow premises and a complete and utter indifference towards information that would help create a society of intelligent well-informed individuals capable of thinking for themselves.
III,
