What is a Newsaper?

If not for the school paper, The Loyolan, I honestly
think I would not read any type of physical newspaper. I know this is not something to be proud of, and I honestly would not be sharing it if I knew this was not the case for many students and people my age.

Realistically,students and many other people now get their information or news from the internet, and or television and radio. The physical newspaper has become a less popular platform, and it is not hard to see that perhaps the newspaper will eventually go obsolete.

The Trayvon Martin story is just one example of the way I receive my news. I can go onto Facebook, and while it is mostly for recreational use, it has also become a site where I keep up with news. It has
become feasible to keep up with current events without having to ever pick up a newspaper. The Internet is a vast platform where we have unlimited information in our possession.

This semester, unintentionally, I ended up with three journalism classes, simply because they fulfill my major requirements as a writing emphasis in English. My attempt to become more aware with the news resulted in me visiting news sites I normally do not. CNN, The LA Times, and The Huffington Post, all websites I would not otherwise visit. Some of my assignments even required me to watch the daily news.

The fact that it is so much more convenient to get the news from the web shows why it has become so much more popular. It is much more efficient to search on the web, as opposed to flipping and folding through pages. We have become a society that is fast paced, so when we want
information, we look for the quickest most efficient way to do so. And nowadays we have the smartphone, computers, and the recent tablet. With these three devices, along with television, we essentially have news 24 hours a day available to us. Google and Wikipedia serve as very popular sites to get quick information.

While it seems a bit unorthodox to say I get some of my current event information from Facebook, it is not as bizarre as it sounds. Facebook has recently become a site where information can be shared, and the shooting story of Trayvon Martin was one of the most recent examples that illustrate this. The news itself comes from an actual and credible site such as CNN, or the New York Times, and conveniently enough all we have to do is click on the video or article. The Kony 2012 video that was recently released shows how news and information can now travel through the internet at an incredible rate.

It is hard to tell if in fact the newspaper will in fact go obsolete in our lifetime, if at all. What is clear is that the newspaper is most popular with the older age group, so all signs point that the generations to follow will not be interested in getting information through a time consuming oversized paper. With this being said, we should think twice when seeing papers such as the Loyolan on campus, for they may be the last newspapers we actually read.
-Erik