It is absolutely fascinating to me how far we have come with technology. Friday morning I woke up, went about my usual routine, and tossed the paper into my school bag to read with the kids in homeroom. We'd been talking about the Boston Marathon tragedy all week and I was excited to continue the conversation and to prove a point-we were moving past the times of printed news.
Friday morning's paper covered details of the two suspects and where they could possibly be found. The paper included pleas to the public to share any information they had. All of that was old news by 6:15 when the text updates from USA Today started pouring into my phone with details of Thursday night's chase. The authorities had caught and killed the older brother and were shutting down Watertown in an attempt to capture the younger brother. All of my paper news was outdated.
Am I the only one out there who finds this absolutely fascinating??
For so long our parents, grandparents, etc leaned on the newspaper for details of the world. Slowly but surely people shifted to the radio and eventually the television as sources, but the newspaper still reigned. It was until the rise of the internet that it all changed. My students' generation could care less about the printed word. To them, it's all about the fastest way to acquire their information and the newspaper is rarely (if ever) the fastest way.
I personally enjoy sitting down with the morning paper on a Saturday morning, but I don't consider it my source of news anymore. If I want news, I'll head to Google. If I want a few minutes to just read and catch up on the world around me, you better believe I'll be at the kitchen table with a newspaper and cup of coffee.
Do you read the paper anymore?
My husband wrote for our local paper for 10 years. With all the crazy budget cuts and staff lay offs, it was just way to stressful for him (Really for both of us) for him to keep working there. Last month he got an office job with the state, but I think he misses writing sometimes. It is just way to hard for print papers to compete with other forms of media.
ReplyDelete