The Newspaper and the Journalist vs. Generation Y

It’s time to face the truth: Newspapers are dying. The 21^st century has made everything so technologically accessible, that people are forgetting to buy their beloved papers every Sunday morning. In a matter of years, we’re bound to see newspapers becoming extinct. (Not saying that they will be extinct for sure, we’ll just have a steep decline in readers.)

I realized that this tragedy was beginning to unfold when I was becoming more and more involved with newspapers. Being a print journalism major, I have taken several classes concerning these white sheets of paper containing newsworthy events. Working on staff with The Voyager, I realized…everyone is resorting to online news. With the internet, it’s so much easier to publish a story online and get it out to readers. With a newspaper, you have to lay out the story, wait for the other stories to turn up before deadline and publish on a specific day. It takes too much effort and there’s always a better chance of news going stale. So many changes have been done this semester with the online Voyager page and I feel like that has helped.

We are what the majority would call “Generation Y” (The Millennial Generation). This generation is dependent on technology. We breathe it and depend on it all the time. People in this generation live off of text messages, social networking sites and humoristic TV news such as “The Daily Show.” (wisegeek.com)

We would rather have John Stewart tell us what’s going on in the world rather than a flaky old newspaper. I guess one could say that we, Generation Y, hate being traditional. Leave the pages to the non-traditional elderly.

Working with newspapers, I have grown to care for them and enjoy sitting at my kitchen table with it in the morning. Maybe it’s because I’m a journalism major, but who’s to say that that’s the reason?

My biggest concern with newspapers is not the newspapers themselves, but the reporters.

These days, with so much technology at the tips of our fingers, I feel like anybody could be a reporter (very much like how a person with a point and shoot camera considers themselves an artist). These “citizen journalists” don’t have enough experience to understand media ethics, or the terms “libel” and “slander.”

Sure, it’s nice, seeing people make an attempt to record news and publish it somewhere, but I’m in need of a job.

I feel like the only way newspapers will withstand the stands of time are advertisements. As our online lecture has taught us, newspaper subscriptions only pay for printing and delivery. The main revenue (50% of it) comes from advertisements, and even those aren’t doing so well these days.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-generation-y.htm