I think I’m over feeling guilty because I don’t consume news the way my dad did with the LA Times spread across the kitchen table every morning. I don’t know why I felt like that was the standard. Not being much of a reader earlier in my life, I must have compensated by squeezing as much information as I could from every means possible. I was alert and aware without being anxious. So I didn’t sit and read. I listened and I watched. So fast forward to 2023 and I’ve long since stopped getting physical books, magazines or newspapers and rarely bother with their digital brethren on the web or my iPad. I get all of my news via podcasts, mostly audio. And that suits me fine. 

I shared the following with my media students last year:

A generation ago news in the United States tended to come into the home in the form of the daily local newspaper and divvying up and reading the huge Sunday edition was a shared family ritual for many. Those days seem to be gone. Today news is more likely to be the background noise coming from the TV that is largely ignored unless there is some global event taking place like an out-of-control wild fires or a hurricane or terrorist attack. Where newspapers were the main source of information has been replace by short Tweets, a headline on FaceBook, or a YouTube/TikTok video. News has gone online and the transition has been more than a little bumpy. Please watch the videos below that ask “What is Journalism?”, “How is Social Media Changing Journalism?” and “Citizen Journalism”

I love this style of communication and information. It does a great job summarizing how journalism has changed and it’s future pressures.

This video reminds of the previous generation of journalists confessing that the profession that they knew is screwed. It’s like, “Crap, what did we do? Wasn’t anyone paying attention to the business model?”

This video is a bit too much “kumbaya,” “we’re all journalists” for my tastes. Yes, everyone has a story to tell and has the potential to tell their story and yes, “objectivity” is problematic. But I’m a bit bothered at the dismissal of the skills involved in gathering information, listening to ones sources, and organizing the story into words. Those are skills that not everyone can do or chooses to do. There’s a real skill there. 

I’m reminded of experiments that I’ve heard where a journalistic organization, in an attempt to be transparent and open, published their stories but also made available all of the unedited background information and media. The thinking was that in the digital world it didn’t really cost anything to give the public access to those resources. You know what happened? It was kind of like all of the newspapers and magazines on my iPad… the resources were ignored. People want the finished product that tells the story without all of the mistakes, restarts and rabbit holes. 

The old model is dead or dying (shhh, over the past week I did buy a couple physical books… usually large format coffee table books with lots of photography). So what are we doing instead of what our parents did? The assignment that I gave to my students ended with the following instructions (which you are welcome to do, and may seem familiar with other requests I’ve posted):

Please write a response to the following prompts:

  • How does your family normally get its daily news?
  • Do the adults in your family spend time with newspapers, watching TV news or listening to news on the radio?
  • Do you or any of your brothers and sisters spend time with newspapers, watching TV news or listening to news on the radio?
  • What’s your favorite way to get news? Do you seek it out or does it come to you in your Social Media?
  • What changes in technology or just in how news is shared, do you think would make news better?

Resources: