Last week we watched the video about the last days of the Rocky Mountain News, a daily newspaper in Denver that has been around for almost 150 years. As journalism students, we constantly hear about the diminishing future of print journalism, so much so that I feel as though I've become immune to news of newspapers folding. My point is that if our teacher had just said, "Today was the last issue of the Rocky Mountain News," I wouldn't have been phased much; but actually watching the documentary and hearing the stories of the Rocky's loyal staff and readers, I was saddened.
So, for my blog entry this week I decided to explore the Rocky's website. Among many features, I found the blog section and fittingly all of the most recent blogs are in tribute to the last days of the beloved newspaper.
The blog I've decided to talk about was written by staff writer and media critic Dave Kopel, and can be found here.
I liked Kopel's blog for many reasons. Firstly, he urges all of the loyal fans of the Rocky to please subscribe to their old competition, The Denver Post, because "a city with one major daily is a lot better than a city with none at all." However, at the same time he stays faithful to his paper, stating that he personally finds that the Rocky covered many stories that the Post did not bother with and covered them thoroughly, as opposed the superficial coverage of some of the Post's stories.
Kopel then goes into the specifics of why newspapers like the Rocky are folding: the internet. He states that although papers gain readership by posting online, they also lose quite a bit of revenue by doing that as well. Likewise, an advertisement online is only one-tenth as effective as a print ad in a newspaper, so with more readers getting their news online, ad revenue obviously decreases. Because of reasons like this, newspapers like the Rocky will continue to fall victim to the internet.
A last thought of Kopel's that I appreciated had to do with those people who only rely on online news. Sure, that quick and convenient, but what Kopel said in reply to this is what really stuck with me: that at the end of the day those online "news sources" get their information from news reporters. And what happens if their are no newspapers, and consequently no true news reporters, left to retrieve that news?
Hopefully it will never reach that point, but I guess only time will tell.
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I'm glad I'm not the only one that gets depressed hearing about how terrible the newspaper industry is now. In almost all my journalism classes, I hear about it in great detail. Luckily, my professors usually throw in the obligatory "don't worry, you'll find a job somewhere" line at the end of their rant. But how do they know?
ReplyDeleteAnd why is it that people are relying more and more to get their news ONLY online? What happened to the need to relax in the morning with the newspaper and a cup of coffee? Now, I don't drink coffee, but I do read the paper.
My boyfriend's roommate always instills faith in me on this issue. He's an accounting grad student here and every morning he sits on his couch for a good hour reading the Wallstreet Journal. At first, I thought this was a requirement for one of his classes, but I figured if that's what it takes to keep papers alive, then fine. Turns out, he does this for fun. I can't lie, the Wallstreet Journal wouldn't be my first choice, but at least I know there are still people out there (even in our own Internet-addicted generation) that still love the newspaper.