I'm Back!

Welcome back to my blog "Can You Say That Again." This semester I am studying Strategic Communication and Emerging Media.

I plan on covering a wide range of topics on my blog this semester. Some topics you can plan on reading about are:

·         Digital Media

·         Mobile and Strategic Communication

·         Social Networking and Strategic Communication

·         Blogging, Citizen Journalism and Digital Democracy

·         Crowd Sourcing, Politics and the Global Impact of Emerging Media

·         Branding and Online Reputations

·         Children, the future of media and regulatory issues

Let’s start.

This week we learned about digital media and the death of newspapers. I have complied a list of reasons why I feel newspapers are a dying breed:

Reason: There’s no Passion in the Journalism.

When you read any front-page news story, chances are it’ll be the driest, most cliché-prone pile of bullet points you’ll find outside of a reporter’s notebook. Beyond the basic story elements (the old’ “Who, What, When, Where, Why and How”) there is rarely any narrative or creative expansion, really no more than the laziest consolidation of a tape recorder’s content. The straight-forwardness is crucial to the relay of the most vital information, but more than being just a journalist (but a bona fide writer), the material should be at least interpreted in a way that would appeal to those otherwise uninterested in bland subject matter (e.g. real estate, finances, etc.). Or just keep on writing to appease the routine-seekers…

Reason: It’s Impractical and Inconvenient.

This is the reason a lot of retro-technology is pushed aside so quickly for the next flashy thing. Vinyl records became immediately bulkier and more involved as soon as CD’s came about, as convenience is always preferred to quality or substance. Accordingly, it’s completely impractical to dig through a compost pile of newspapers to ascertain a news story from last year; whereas with the internet, archives exist, and virtually nothing is out of reach with a single laptop or handheld smartphone with internet access. Then there’s the matter of paper waste, the very reason hardcore green-heads don’t read the paper.

No longer are there paper boys but now you can read the news at a tap of a button.

Again, welcome back. We have so much to talk about!

Big Business Pretensions.

Again, the newspaper industry still thinks it’s on the same page as Wall Street, Big Oil and Big Tobacco, and can maintain that Tony Montana business ethos of wasteful expenditures and general impetuosity. It’s almost foolish to think you can keep up a business full of highly-demanding, not to mention overpaid, staff members, providing benefits and the kinds of perks that are usually found in the fluffiest regions of the corporate world. But when starving journalists fresh out of grad school are willing to do the exact same work for a lot less, and with a lot more zeal for the trade as an art form, it becomes a million times more practical to take on a body of freelancers who cut overhead into a fractional value. But if you insist on guaranteeing each employee gets a new jet ski or swimming pool full of caviar for a Christmas bonus, so be it.