It is EVERYONE's favorite form of media- Newspapers! Wait....what? To tell you the truth, it isn't. With the advances in technology over the years, waking up and reading the newspaper with your morning coffee is becoming a thing of the past. With more than 1 billion personal computers being used worldwide, most of them in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, many people have internet access.
All of you reading this have some form of internet access. Many people have more than one laptop in their homes. There are many websites on the internet that have up-to-the-minute news. Some of these websites are Google News, Yahoo! News, and CNN.com. National sports news can be found at espn.com. Even local newspapers such as The Valley City Times Record and The Minot Daily News have websites that include much of the same information that is in the paper.
So, with all these online resources for news, it brings up the question "What is the point of buying a subscription to a newspaper if you can get all of the information online?" A few cases come to mind. When I was growing up, we got a newspaper subscription for the sole purpose to read about the local sports with the hopes to see an article about the Gleburn High School sports teams that my brothers and I were a part of. We would then cut these articles out and send them to my grandma where she would scrapbook them. Along with scrapbookers, some people that would prefer to subscribe to a newspaper would be the small percentage of people that don't have internet access at home, people who just prefer the paper, or maybe someone who likes to use the newspaper, not only for news, but for special crafts.
It is this population of people that is barely keeping newspapers alive. Many newspapers such as The Rocky Mountain News that we learned about in class have shut down. So, what do you think? What is the future of newspapers? I, personally, think they are going to be nearly obsolete in a couple of decades.
There is a different atmosphere when reading the newspaper. The news is not updated by the minute, but I think that in most cases, we don't need it to be. I like the paper better than the news online because of the comics and the puzzles. I think the paper becomes a habit and nothing else can be quite like it or take its place.
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