Daily Cascade

Have Newpapers Become Relics?

Prompt: Newspapers
In the month of September, 1851, the New York Times newspaper was first published. In your opinion, in our day, are newspapers becoming relics? And if you were to establish your very own newspaper publication, what would its features be and what kind of news it would mostly contain?

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The old respectable ones, yes. Such newspapers are already relics. But why should we be surprised?

In the first place, the ease, price, and comfort of today's technology aside, the new newspaper people and columnists lack the intellectual capacity and the respect we used to get from the old and now defunct professionals. Unfortunately, journalism, or the art of writing fair, unbiased articles for newspapers, magazines, and other paper media is very nearly dead. To tell the truth, I can't even blame publishers and paper media that still insist working in an industry trying to take its last short breaths.

Then, after saying all that in the above paragraph, who can expect me to have my own newspaper publication? It's now the newspaper trade that has become the news by shutting their doors one by one.

If you take any newspaper today and look at its articles and opinion pages, you'll see that the content has become simpler and much shorter. This may be due to the social networks all over the internet and our ease of taking photos and videos of the incidents ourselves that would take pages to write about and evaluate.

Would I try to establish my own newspaper, now? It would only take a miracle. But for argument's sake, let's say that such a miracle happened, or maybe all the digital and streaming media went kaput for a while. Then, that would be the rebirth of paper media. Wouldn't it! In which case, my newspaper would contain more reader interaction and fact-checking and strict editorial rigor. So, I guess, my newspaper would be something close to what the newspapers contained in the olden times, say 1950s to 1970s.

To put it straight, all the news media today can be much more nuanced because a deep understanding of the evolving needs of populations is necessary.

Even so, if we were to apply such reformations to newspaper publications, it could only be possible when and if a miracle or a catastrophe happened to all other digital and electronic media. While people are used to the new stuff nowadays, oldies like me still yearn for good journalism. I guess we are all paying the price for evolution.