American journalism is changing, especially with newspapers. With staff cuts, new ways of funding and a change in demographics, newspapers are shrinking or essentially dying out. How can we change this? We can’t.
Some might propose that newspapers should not allow their reporting to be published in multimedia, so that if the public wants to read that newspaper’s report, they would have to buy and read the newspaper. However, this would never work because of the Internet’s role in this day-in-age. People could easily put on the internet certain articles from newspapers, or summarize them. Therefore those who haven’t bought a newspaper would still be able to read them. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, entrepreneurs have actually used this span of the internet to suggest that consumers of news could allow what they are reading on the internet to be monitored, that way “news organizations could sell highly targeted groups of readers to advertise at high prices.” The problem with this is once again the internet. With the reputation of the internet having access to many sites that offer free news, it is impossible to know whether or not this solution would work.
Another tantalizing proposal to save American journalism could be to build up local news by working with the journalism programs at local colleges and universities. Many young reporters that work for their schools’ newspaper have open eyes to the local news in their areas. By collaborating with these school newspapers, these young journalists can give a fresh, young insight into the local news for newspapers without the newspapers having to spend too much paying them, depending on the collaboration deal. The students need to build portfolios for themselves, so they need this job as much as the newspapers, who cannot afford to hire full time local news reporters. They could even help with television and radio coverage of local news, since these are the media outlets which the Columbia Journalism Review reports do little or not local news reporting. With classrooms in colleges and universities having access to multimedia equipment such as digital and video cameras and school radio stations, students can easily report on local news and collaborate with other sources of news to get it out.
Another possibility to this local news gap in American journalism is the internet. Although it seems problematic to independent news reporting because of it’s accessibility to free news, the internet attracts many bloggers who often write about the news. Newspapers can hire these bloggers and still get their local news without paying the bloggers much. Doing so not only helps newspapers build on the local level, but also helps them inject new ways of producing news. However, this has its flaws as well. Although many free-lancers, bloggers and students would probably not mind at first being paid little or nothing at all to contribute to the news, they will of course eventually. It is hard to say that every young reporter or blogger would want to stick to the old stereotype of interning for free just for credit. With the times changing, so are people and especially in these economic times, one cannot blame these writing aspirantswho want something more than credit for their hard work.
The problem with American journalism is that there are many proposals for a solution, but they are not guaranteed to fix the decline of newspapers. I believe that newspapers will always be on this downward slope as the years go by, although they may not disappear completely.
I also think that large newspapers in cities like New York will go completely online. Local papers, however, may stay in print. An example is Baruch College’s newspaper The Ticker. The online readership is far below the paper readership, and this might be true for small town papers.