Frank A. DeFilippo minces no words in his essay, "What it Means When a City Loses its Paper." Beyond job losses, he numbers cultural illiteracy and increasingly unwatched local government as the sentence for communities that presume that digital media will fill the void.
I feel like I'm a strange hybrid in this media evolution: I'm both a blogger and a subscriber to my local newspaper (the Detroit Free Press). I embrace social networking tools and innovations, and I also take great joy in purchasing print magazines and journals. I submit and publish my writing in both online and print publications.
I don't do any of this out of pity for print mediums, or out of an inflated sense of digital technology being, singularly, "the future." I don't do it because I feel like I "should;" I do it because I like it, as a reader, a writer, a communicator, a person who feels deeply that, like DeFilippo, watchdog investigative journalism is worth investing in, not merely sounding off about. And while new media has certainly played the watchdog role, and will continue to do so, it remains that, generally, newspapers can claim the greatest systems of reporting--editing, reporting, a balance of accuracy and timeliness, a willingness to engage in that exercise of empathy as they present news in the msot objective way they can.
Through a large survey I conducted for a nonprofit, and certainly in my own experience, I've seen a strange dissonance: People trust print media, but they read online media.
There is a reason for both of those things: Print media has earned that trust over centuries of honing its craft, while online media offers unparalleled accessibility and timeliness.
I like to think that when this media chaos and crisis settles down, we'll find ourselves in a meaningful balance of print and online media, both individually and as a culture. I am concerned, like DeFilippo, that in our haste to embrace the gifts of online media, we're decimating print media entirely. At the other end of that rush, when we realize again that there are certain precious things that print media offers that cannot be replicated, we will be forced to rebuild something precious, something that wasn't by any means swiftly built in the first place.
Why go through that? "What is to be done?"
It's quite plain: make the personal political. Choose to invest your time and financial support behind the media that would pain you if it were lost. It's hardly an act of charity; in return you get to enjoy the benefits.
Nobody asks me why I embrace digital technology (well, almost nobody). But people are surprised to find that I'm a regular newspaper reader and subscriber. I offer, then, my reasons why:
1) Because there is no comparable source of intelligent, expansive coverage of my city, region, and state. Nothing even close. And I care about what's happening.
2) Because the newspaper has actively made my city a better and healthier place--not just by being active in the community by sponsoring, for example, the Detroit Marathon, but by catalyzing the downfall of our crook of a former mayor. (Happily, they were honored for their aggressive, painstaking investigative work by winning a Pulitzer Prize.)
3) Because it's easier to read the paper at breakfast, than it is to read a book, or scroll on a computer.
4) Because I like the mix of news, features, sports, editorial, and, um, comics (especially "Get Fuzzy") that appears in my newspaper.
5) To those who say that newspapers are bad for the environment, I point out that my subscription is an essential piece of my worm compost bin. And it's not as if computers run on vegetable oil (yet).
6) Because I just like it.
Image Credit: Splice Today
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