Rolling with the punches

We hear it all the time: newspapers are on the decline. And the facts tend to support that idea. Studies have shown that fewer and fewer people are turning to print media to get their daily news, while most don’t rank newspaper content high in regards to trustworthiness and accuracy. As these facts are released, newspapers are changing hands, cutting jobs or closing.

All of this makes it easy to be pessimistic about the situation newspapers are in today. Surely many people don’t see a problem with some small paper across the country shutting down. They didn’t read it anyway. They can get their news from online or TV – if they’re looking to get the news at all.

The future of print media also is confusing. We have spent the past four years learning the value of providing news to people. We’re told in class that the newspaper job market isn’t looking so good and that newspapers could be dead soon, and then we’re sent to cover a story for the Missourian.

What are we supposed to do? Unless everyone is going to change his or her career path, it might make sense to be more optimistic. We have the journalistic training to conduct interviews, investigate, report and write stories. So maybe those skills can be put to use in different ways. If studies show that people look to the Internet as one of their top ways of getting the news, then the news needs to be there. And we can write it.

As difficult as it is for me to say, having little experience with any types of journalism outside of print and being perfectly happy to never need to, it is important to be willing to adapt. Newspaper reporters, by working with other forms of media, including broadcast and online, could get their work to people in more non-traditional ways.

If it’s quick and easy for people to go online, and more than likely they’re already online for another reason, newspapers should have their content there in an extremely easy-to-navigate, yet appealing format.

So maybe print journalists need to be willing to stick with the industry as it comes into this ever-advancing technological age in the hopes that the kind of reporting they have learned to do will be valued and read online.

The News About the News gave the example of how the MSNBC.com newsroom worked. Most of the people there were involved in getting news content, including text and also audio and video, online. Some were rewriting stories from wire services, but few were doing original reporting. Though the book’s authors described the site’s director of multimedia as saying, “that eventually the new medium should emulate the in-depth reporting of newspapers rather than the ‘shallow’ journalism of television news” (Downie and Kaiser, 199). Though he said that when MSNBC.com first began, most of the time and money was dedicated toward developing technology rather than creating original journalism.

As less and less time is needed to be spent on the technological aspect of news Web sites, hopefully more time will be spent on producing good journalism. Then space can be made, though it may not be space on paper, for the work that we do.

But then the next problem may be that people aren’t too interested in reading good journalism, no matter where it might be found. Investigative stories, interesting profiles and articulate feature stories require time and an invested audience. People today place great value on getting things done quickly, including getting their news.

So newspapers should make an effort to find out what their readers want. As the study in class said, people want what they want how they want it. Papers should foster more interactive audiences. However, The News about the News gave the examples of how market research hasn’t helped improve readership – when the results meant papers shortened their articles and printed fewer hard-news stories. So there should be a balance, or a little bit of a compromise.

This also means that all stories should make an attempt to connect the issues with the readers. People are more inclined to read stories about that which affects them.

That was one of the reasons The News About the News cited for newspaper readership increasing so dramatically the day after September 11.

“A genuine national crisis confirmed that Americans still want good journalism when they perceive that their own interests are at risk” (Downie and Kaiser, 28).

This type of significant life-changing event doesn’t happen every day, so it is a journalist’s job to take the every day occurrences and make them something people will want to read about.

Thomas King, in his book, The Truth About Stories, addressed how powerful stories can be and what they can do for people, “It was Sir Isaac Newton who said, ‘To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.’ Had he been a writer, he might have simply said, ‘To every action there is a story” (28-29).

Though print media may have an uncertain future and journalists will need to be ready to adapt with the changes, a good story, that people can relate to and understand, should always have a place in journalism.