Commentary
Newspapers No More
For colleges, it’s all the news that’s fit to print—online
lilyq@nyu.edu
I’m a college journalism major and I don’t like newspapers. I don’t hate them, I just think they’re no longer necessary. After all, newspapers—and specifically college newspapers—are expensive, stale and, for those of you who care about the trees, murderous to the environment.
So, why do undergraduates across the country still print thousands of copies five days a week, ignore the fact that readership is moving to the Internet and watch the product of much labor and toil languish unread on the racks and hallway floors?
Newspapers used to be the preferred medium for getting news out on campus. Now it’s the slowest and the most wasteful. Printing a paper once a day can’t compete for timeliness with updating a website 24/7. The speed of Internet publication allows for the immediate dissemination of breaking news, and offers the reader the opportunity for more interaction with editors and correspondents. Instead of sending a letter to the editor knowing full well that it may never be read, let alone published, online subscribers can often leave their feedback in the comments section immediately after each story.
“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing The Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” publisher Arthur Sulzberger told a reporter for the Israeli daily Haaretz earlier this year. Large national papers such as The New York Times are moving to an online format already, but an average print readership age of 47 prevents them from making a full switch immediately. This is unfortunate for The Times, whose 2007 earnings showed a 6.9% drop in print ad revenue accompanied by online ad revenue growth.
College students, however use the Internet for everything from class registration to social networking to obsessively poring over pictures of the Jolie-Pitt brood.
Perhaps that’s why debt-laden college papers like The Hilltop at Howard University have stopped printing hard copies entirely in favor of much less expensive Internet publishing. JS Printing, a school publication press in Alabama, is among the less expensive printers. The production cost of 10,000 black-and-white eight-pagers is still a whopping $1,700, and then there’s distribution. An online paper can handle thousands of hits at a time and cost as little as $100 per month to produce.
Stephen Dockery, the editor of the Syracuse University’s Daily Orange, dispelled the fear that the absence of a printed paper would mean a drop in online readership. He told Gawker that “online readership was as high as it usually is,” even after the print version of the paper was cut back to four issues per week.
You see, switching from a hard copy that we can read in the bathtub, on the subway, in the park, while inconvenient, isn’t much of an adjustment at all. It’s a natural progression for teenagers and twentysomethings who are increasingly concerned about the environment, and rarely more than 10 feet from a computer.
After all, reading a hard copy of your school’s paper requires finding that copy, carrying it around and making the challenging decision about how to fold the ungainly thing. That’s a lot of effort. And what do you get for all your trouble? If you’re lucky, a decent article and a small, fuzzy picture. Online, however, coverage of a school play comes with a video; a discussion of Madonna’s bizarre leotard fixation has an accompanying slide show; and it’s all easily read in bed.
So cast your votes now: will you embrace and shape of the online revolution now, or be forced to accept it later?
