In 1714, colonial Americans read of the death of Queen Anne in their local newspapers. The story was reported some 46 days after the monarch's passing.
Two hundred ninety-one years later, Americans learned of the death of Pope John Paul II on radio, television and the Internet. The story was reported within moments of the Bishop of Rome passing.
The past three centuries have revealed the rise, peak and decline of the newspaper. While there was a time as recently as the 1980s when news only came in two formats — 30 minutes long and six columns wide — the reality is that today the print media is a mechanism of nostalgia that borders on being outright anachronistic.
For news of a national and worldwide nature, 24-hour networks and constantly monitored websites have eclipsed the role of the print media in almost every capacity. Bernard Shaw took cover under a desk as the Gulf War raged and satellites shared those images with viewers worldwide on an almost instantaneous basis. Matt Drudge reported on a young woman named Monica Lewinsky via his blog-style website and, before long, the president of the United States was impeached.
Even on a local level, AM radio delivers Little League scores and City Hall flashes first. Network affiliates now bring television cameras into almost every newsworthy aspect of modern America, and those images are shared through coaxial and Ethernet lines alike.
As newspapers teeter on irrelevancy, the American print media does itself few favors. Investigative journalism and intellectual commentary would seem to be the daily publication's last claims to necessity, and yet, newsrooms across the nation continue to see the decline in staffing of projects desks and hyper-syndication of opinion columns. A core group of websites now place the day's finest editorial commentary online well before presses roll on the east coast, and muckraking is increasingly becoming the domain of broadcast outlets with ambush-happy reporters and bloggers with a keen eye for those things that simply don't jive.
Worse yet, too many newspapers now rely on those very competing institutions to replace, not compliment, coverage. When daily publications across the country buckled under pressure and willfully turned a blind eye toward First Amendment duties as a group of cartoons instigated riots and outrage worldwide, too often editors defended their failure to fully report the story by claiming that the potentially offensive portions might be found on the Internet instead. It was not merely a moment of unparalleled cowardice; it was a milestone in the decline of the print media and the rise of the online press.
To be sure, the news media will long prosper. There is a demand for factual reporting, investigative digging and highbrow commentary that shows no sign of wavering. Indeed, the ends will surely remain the same. But the means are changing, as fewer newspapers are tossed onto doorsteps and more citizens turn to channel listings and search engines.
For the print media, I have the greatest affection. And to edit this newspaper for the past year has been a truly high honor. But after spending the past nine years in the worlds of cinematic, political and analysis-driven news, it is easy to realize that I arrived on the scene just in time to witness the rise of the Internet and the fall of the newspaper.
There will be no one defining moment to mark the end of this metamorphosis — though one must wonder if today's college students will see the last press run of the New York Times during their lifetime. But for now, the devolution of newspapers is a gradual thing. Print inches continue to be filled and headlines are still measured by column width.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Mac VerStandig ([email protected]) is editor in chief of The Badger Herald and a senior majoring in rhetoric. This marks his final article in this newspaper.
