March 2nd, 2009

Newswriting and Reporting

While watching that clip in class about the Rocky out of Colorado going out of production and being sold, I sort of got sad. Although writing for a newspaper isn’t my career of choice, it’s in my field of choice, which is communication and media. Such things make those in the industry, I imagine, very nervous. If I was a writer for a newspaper and I watched that video clip, the first thing I’d start to wonder would be “how long until my paper has to be sold, and I lose my job here?”
It seems as though we’re losing media outlets like the newspaper and radio to the internet and other technologies. People sit back in their chairs in their office, pull up their web browser and have a look at Google news or CNN.com to get their news anymore as opposed to going out to their mailbox every morning to get their newspaper out of the box, then skimming through it to look for the stories they are interested in.
I feel like there are a lot of jobs and passions at stake when the newspaper industry doesn’t have the funding to keep the paper in production. If I were a writer for a newspaper that was going out of business, I’d be skeptical about getting another job in the field, because I’d wonder if I would lose that job eventually too, then in time have to move to another career field altogether. Granted, I’d try my hardest to do what I loved, if I lost my job because the newspaper went out of production, it would break my heart. “Nobody reads the newspaper anymore,” I’d think to myself. “How am I going to do what I love if there isn’t a demand for it?”
It makes you wonder if the economy is getting so bad that we can’t afford to provide people with news that could be delivered to their doors. Not everybody has the internet, but everybody that has a home (or rents an apartment or house, or whatever the living situation may be) has a way to receive mail. I want to read local news. I live close to St. Louis, so I want to read about news in the Metro East, or maybe sometimes Springfield. I don’t care what’s going on in Kansas City, but if the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the State Journal Register were to go under, I’d be stuck reading a newspaper from perhaps Kansas City, or from across the state.
I think the future of mass communications still has hope, despite all of the changes being made. More people are reading their news online, but there are still plenty of people who would rather receive a newspaper and read their news from that medium. As far as my field goes, radio is the same way. It could go under due to iPods and Zunes, but it can also still stick around because there are still people who like to listen to the radio, despite the couple minutes of commercials every so often. I think there is hope for the future of mass communications, and I have a very good field that there’s always going to be a seemingly decent demand for newspapers in the future.