Author: Dean DeChiaro
I’ve been around newspapers for a very long time. My mother, who went on sabbatical for the first five years of my life to raise me, supported my family by delivering newspapers around my hometown in the wee hours of the morning. I wasn’t a very heavy sleeper, and I ended up going on most of her runs with her. I started reading newspapers as soon as I could comprehend what was going on in the world, and in eighth grade, I was Editor-in-Chief of my middle school newspaper. When I got to high school, I founded the school newspaper there, and served as Editor-in-Chief for four years. And now I’m here at Oxy, serving as the opinions editor on the Oxy Weekly. Newspapers are almost part of me, and now, as we enter an age where so-called “new media” is taking over, I think people need to sit back and think about whether or not they want to live in a world where the physical, tangible newspaper is a thing of the past.
It is true that the traditional newspaper’s days are numbered. More and more people read The New York Times or the L.A. Times online everyday and news and opinions blogs are becoming people’s new main source for their news. Amazon’s new eBook product Kindle has access to over 250 worldwide newspapers, which can be read for much less money than your normal daily paper. Some of the nation’s oldest and most revered journalism graduate schools now have majors dealing with Web Journalism, Media Journalism, and other forms of “new media.” It is safe, however unsettling, to say that when our children and their children begin reading, the newspaper will be a thing of the past.
There aren’t enough people in the world who believe that sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee or tea and reading the Sunday New York Times is an essential part of the week. You’re not going to find enough people who are willing to make the stop at the deli or the newsstand on the way to school or work to pick up a copy of the paper, especially when they know that they could read the same thing online when they arrive at the office. However, this is no reason that printed newspapers should ever go under, and it is the duty of every Sunday Times reader to make sure that this happens.
It is the duty of a journalist, in essence, to provide the truth to as many people as possible. I suppose that this is a duty that transcends the medium used to reach those people, but I still believe that the truth can never be reported in any way other than in the headlines of a newspaper. Blogs will always be biased, and online newspapers will always be crude. But to read a newspaper, hot off the presses, and let the ink stain your hands and witness the first draft of history less than 12 hours after it has happened, holds a certain romance that no blog or eNewspaper can ever rival.
I know that there is not a lot of practicality to keeping printed newspaper in circulation. It may lose companies money and it might waste paper. But, if we must go out, we will go out with pens scribbling. What started with The Daily Courant in 1702 may very well end with The New York Times one day—but when that day comes, I hope it will be on a Monday, so I could have enjoyed one more day with my precious Sunday Times.
Dean DeChiaro is a first-year History major. He can be reached dechiaro@oxy.edu.
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