The newspaper’s demise?
I’ve recently been working with my college newspaper, The Eastern Echo, to increase its readership. In this day and age, it’s hard to compete with all of the electronic media that deliver news on an almost instantaneous basis. Our 3-day per week publication does also put everything online, but we just don’t see the readership. It has been declining for years and it’s become a huge worry.
I think a lot of it is going to come down to design. We’ve got to find ways to drive students and community members to the paper instead of to other sources like other print media, TV and the Internet. Newspapers are just so boring compared to the heavy graphics and full color of the electronic media. And since we’re not in a Harry Potter storybook, the photos can’t move in print like they can electronically. Print media seems to be falling behind more and more, creating an ever increasing gap between print and electronic.
Do I think newspapers will die out? No. They’ve survived radio and television. Why wouldn’t they survive the Internet? It’s a matter of adaptation. Newspapers and the like have got to face their fears and redesign. They’ve got to offer something that can’t be found on the Internet, radio or television. Newspapers need to localize like no other and tailor the format of their stories to their readers specific needs, likes and wants. They’ve got to go full-color and pump up the graphics. A reader doesn’t want to dig through the full story unless they’re fully invested in it. So newspapers have got to provide a ton of ways for the reader to get the same story with as few words as possible.
There are people doing it. I’ve mentioned The Northwest Iowa Review before. That particular paper has been quite successful, even with electronic media being the much flashier, and admittedly stronger, competition.
My newspaper is cutting down to 2 publications per week. We just don’t have the resources to keep publishing 3 times when the third issue of the week is read so little. But we are also looking at going full color once our printer installs a new piece of equipment. But as helpful as that may be, we can’t get very far unless redesigning comes into play. Words on a page make everything gray and boring. We need more and better photos along with graphics and sidebars. If we are able to redesign successfully, we will draw more readers and, in turn advertisers. We will start making more money through that process and then can afford to make the paper an even more successful publication.
Reading recommendation
Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” was one of those books that I’ve picked up a hundred times in the bookstore but never purchased. Then it was recommended to me by Tim Fletcher, the lead singer of The Stills, and I finally bought it. I don’t regret it.
From the moment I cracked open the book and started the first page, I knew it would be different. But I wasn’t afraid of different, just leery. The story details the travels of a man and his son in a post-apocalyptic world. They dodge strangers who have turned cannibalistic to survive while refusing to do so themselves. Instead, they scrounge for food and water in a desolate ghost world that’s already been completely looted by previous survivors. There’s no electricity, no conveniences and hardly any animals left wandering the earth to hunt. The world is only a shell of itself.
The relationship between the man and his boy is very compelling. It’s painful at times knowing that the boy can only understand so much and the father must make him walk away from nearly everything in order to survive. The emotions are beautifully portrayed and hit your heart, especially from the boy’s perspective. It’s devastating.
But the book provides a lot of food for thought. We are so dependent on technology and electricity. Could we survive through such a disaster? The threat of nuclear war is always in the back of the government’s mind. Should it come to pass, and should it get bad enough, there might not be much of anything left of the world we know. I’ve met people that don’t seem to know any of the basics about taking care of themselves. Would they even be able to make it after an apocalyptic event were it to happen? Maybe it’s time to learn some of the basic survival skills like building a fire from nothing or how to tell if water is safe to drink.
I loved this book and recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind thinking when they read. It was a fairly quick read but not to be shrugged off by any means. It definitely gives you something to think about. And trust me, you will be thinking about it.
Racial divides? Think again
It’s always seemed curious to me how people refer to races. I’m just about as white as they come without being albino. How does that classify me? And why in the world should I be classified by the fact that I’m white? What the hell does race mean anyway?
Race is a socially constructed idea. There’s actually scientific proof that there are less genetic differences between “races” than there are within a certain “race.” I can only think that the idea of race was placed into our society in order to deem ourselves superior to others. Africans were enslaved for supposedly being inferior. Millions of Jews were slaughtered for supposedly being inferior. There have been genecides and wars over such a silly concept as race.
But race is such a part of our society and our collective thinking that it’s hard to get past. We’ve been raised knowing that there are significant differences between “races” – a false ideal that much of the world still believes. Here at home in the USA, the main difference seems to continually be white versus black. But few people know that since slavery and the interactions between masters and their slaves, our genes have intertwined. Most, if not all, Americans have African American blood running in their veins, even if only a drop or two.
Think about it.
Definitions
Speak: v. to utter words, talk; speak out (or up) – to speak clearly or freely; speak to – to respond to, deal with, etc.
Yourself: pron. a form of you, used as an intensive (you said so yourself), as a reflexive (you hurt yourself) or with the meaning “your true self” (you are not yourself today)
Speak yourself. Think about it.
