The day my dad canceled his newspaper subscription, it broke my heart. After faithfully reading newspapers since he was a teenager, he said he didn't need a subscription anymore because he could read the articles online.
The worst decision newspapers ever made was giving free access to their articles online. The best decision they could make would be to yank them off.
News has never been more accessible to college students, but most of them couldn't care less.
The New York Times has been giving away copies at Chico State for several weeks, but the majority of them have gone unread. Yahoo News can send breaking updates via e-mail, instant message and text message, but the average college student is still blown away when told about events that dominate front pages nationwide. Nearly every newspaper puts its articles online, but young people would rather hit up MySpace.
Most college students aren't going to read the news no matter what, so putting it online won't do much to attract them. Newspapers should stop trying to appeal to a demographic that will never care about news and instead focus on older people, who have a greater stake in society and are more likely to be care about the rest of the world.
The print media have ignored young people for decades, but they thrived without them until they, well, developed Web sites.
But doesn't conventional wisdom tell us it's only a matter of time before the Internet makes newspapers a thing of the past? It shouldn't. The Internet will fail to topple newspapers for the same reason radio and television failed: Its immediacy is offset by its shallowness.
No other medium can match newspapers' depth. For years, big news events would be reported on radio and television soon after they happened, but older people have been more than willing to pay a few coins to read the details the next day.
Did you miss last night's Kings game? The Sacramento Bee will have several articles about it and maybe a column, while the evening telecast might devote 20 seconds to highlight footage. Hate sports? You can ignore the sports section, but you can't fast-forward through the boring game recaps on television.
News Web sites rely almost exclusively on newspapers and wire services to provide their content, and they give back little in return. Without newspapers doing the legwork, is Google News going to hire a horde of reporters to pick up the slack?
If newspapers stop providing news Web sites with free content, then the profits will return to the hard-working reporters instead of going to the lazy search engines.
I'll admit that newspapers are a bit of a pain. There are about five stories on any front page, and each one requires readers to stop in their tracks and flip to the inside. Newspapers make loud rustling noises and get ink all over your hands. They are filled with yesterday's news, and sometimes they can't even tell you who won last night's game if it went into extra innings.
However, presenting the news online is much worse. You don't get that satisfaction of being done with the paper; instead, you are presented with a sea of headline links you could never possibly finish. To read something on The Sacramento Bee's site, Web surfers must wade through 11 categories and countless subcategories of news before getting to an actual article.
People don't look for news in preconceived categories. Who goes to a newspaper's Web site thinking, "Man, I really want to read a News --> Community News --> Roseville article"?
Newspapers' Web sites are annoying for readers, but they will prove to be kryptonite for the newspapers themselves. The editor of The Modesto Bee told me that online advertising accounts for roughly 5 percent of the paper's revenue. If print journalism becomes obsolete, I can't imagine online revenue will be able to keep the newspaper afloat.
As they become more mature, many people begin to fall in love with the newspaper, but that can only happen if they are exposed to it. I try to read The Orion and other newspapers before class as much as possible, and almost invariably, someone will ask to see the comics, the sports or whatever else.
People will always be willing to pay for in-depth, well-reported articles. The Internet will only be a threat to the future of newspapers if they keep giving people no incentive to buy a subscription.
Greg Finley can be reached at
Be the first to comment on this article!