News streams out of every room in my house — on TV, radio or computer. When my Dad visits from out of state for Thanksgiving, I tell him he can read almost any newspaper in the country from my laptop on the kitchen countertop, with its wireless Internet connection.
But he insists on walking the half-mile down our dirt road every morning at 7 to get the rolled-up Tracy Press in the newspaper tube. He’s used to a morning paper he can hold with his coffee.
Call it habit, he says.
With all the news about the demise of newspapers — declining circulation, competition for advertising and rising costs — it’s good to see newspapers consumed as well as they are. I often hear from people who tell me they read every word of the Tracy Press, and if the paper doesn’t get delivered on time, they call to complain — bitterly.
While I hate it when our delivery fails, I love to hear how much people care.
We’ve recently started a new weekly newspaper that serves Manteca and Lathrop. With newspapers across the country laying off some 2,000 workers this year, we keep hiring. Call us optimistic or call us crazy. We’re betting the farm that we’ll be around, in some form, for another 107 years.
Meanwhile, I get feedback from a lot of readers in response to this blog.
One former Tracy resident described how his mother sent him two weeks’ worth of the hometown paper when he left home, and he’d sit down for an hour or more and read everything from club notes to classifieds, describing it as his voyeuristic peek into the lives of the people he once knew and loved.
“Don’t forget the comfort factor,” he commented. “I read two or three papers on the Web each day, but the Web will never replace the comfort of a turned newsprint page.”
That made me wonder why other people read the newspaper when they could just fire up a computer to get some news. I googled “reasons to read newspapers” and found this list of 10, written by newsman Tom Rouillard and posted on Tim Porter's excellent media blog. Take a look, and maybe you have some of your own to add):
• The newspaper has never burned my lap (Macs run hot).
• The flight attendant has never told me to put my newspaper away.
• I can read my newspaper while standing, while eating, while riding a bus.
• I can give my newspaper to someone else when I am done.
• I can read the A section while my wife reads the metro section.
• My newspaper’s battery never dies.
• If my newspaper gets wet, I can buy another for about a buck.
• I can recycle my newspaper at the curb.
• If I drop my newspaper, it doesn’t break.
• I can read my newspaper during a lightning storm.
I’ll add this one, from the lyrics of Mick Jagger:
• Old habits die hard.
I learned that from my Dad.
1 comment:
While holding print in the hand gives the news a personal touch, I fear newspapers are sadly becoming a technology of the past.
Certainly all of the items above, concerning newspapers over computerized news gathering, are true; there is one glaring thing that give computerized news gathering a decided edge over newspapers. That advantage is one brought on by comparative analysis of information in the news.
Having lived in non-English speaking countries early on in my adult life, my viewpoint of the world relied primarily on radio. Like newspapers, though, I frequently found individual stations to be biased according to the thoughts of their editors. This often resulted in a skewed reporting of the news where some information was provided and other information withheld for one reason or another.
I quickly learned how to vary my usage of radio to gain other viewpoints concerning various newsworthy items and thereby gained a better perspective of what actually took place.
Today, in the world of the Internet and computer, I still utilize this technique, and it is much easier to "poll" many news sources in order to gain a clearer perspective of what is actually happening in the world around us, instead of what just one or two newspaper editors feel is worthy to report or even withhold from their local readers.
Using the Internet, I can easily travel the globe to read what other news sources have to say about a particular topic and am often surprised how the story is changed in a modern-day version of a child's game of post office.
For those of you unfamiliar with the game, one child reads a story and silently whispers it to the child to his left or right. The story then, whispered in succession from one child to the next in a circle, is announced by the last child in the circle. Then the results of the last story and the original story are compared revealing biases, deletions and embellishments that each child has interjected along the way.
Our news media is much the same way, as this is more a factor of human nature and not a true intentional distortion of the truth. Knowing this then, it becomes incumbent on the seeker of truth to examine the story from many angles in order to determine the truth and facts relational to the story.
Without the comparative analysis technique applied to the news, the reader is simply being spoonfed information that may contain elements of the truth but may also cause the reader to reach a conclusion that is false or even sometimes intentionally distorted for one reason or another.
Granted, much of the time news stories are not individually important enough to make much of a difference either way. But all too often, there are stores contained in our newspapers that are of social importance as they galvanize our society into thinking one way when actually, given all of the information available, it might just as easily reach another conclusion.
I learned that as a result of my life's experience in dealing with such things.
Posted by: Dave Hardesty at November 30, 2005 07:47 AM
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