The Death of Newsprint: Birth of an Idiocracy?

People love the dry rub of ink on blackened fingers. They love wrestling with the turgid crease of a tabloid format, flipping pages in tight spaces like subway trains and coffee tables. People love the flyers than rain out and the special edition sections and the search for the nomadic crossword section. And until you can walk into a midwestern coffee house to find a luncheon crowd of families and truckers hunched over their phones, scrolling the headlines on a two inch screen, I'm not ready to eulogize the printed word just yet.

I'm an optimist at heart. I'm also reminded that when the camera was invented, people decried the death of painting, cheerily claiming the artform to be obsolete and forgettable.

Newspapers are feeling the Economopocalypse like many industries. Some have actually shut down, and others threaten to follow suit. Some people mourn. Some people work to reinvent the business model. Some people cheer for the woodlands. Others see another nail in the coffin of accountable journalism.

Traditional journalism is definitely in trouble. A small but increasing number of news agencies have implemented some form of citizen journalism into their ranks, as a force for good. The democratization of the news. A grassroots level of consumer-level involvement. There's an obvious argument about fact-checking and accountability that's been debated since the day Wikipedia threw out their welcome mat and can wait for another day. I want to talk about stupification.

Princeton did a study that showed how the loss of a local newspaper has an "immediate and measurable impact on local political engagement". The fear is that in the same way TV makes us stupid, the internet is going to make us stupid and lazy; and when it comes to internet news coverage, users favour more sensationalistic national headlines and viral entertainment over local issues. The internet is the perfect venue for indepth coverage, but people are more likely to stay for the salient points and click to the next headline rather than reading "cover to cover".

Dark economic times don't make people stupider, but they're coniciding with a point in history where some percentage of the masses drank the kool-aid and bought into flashy adult edutainment rather than boring and proper civic discourse. Evidence of this exists in the number of editorial departments that left community news to focus on the more lucrative tabloid format, increasing stimulation and decreasing decimination (of actual news).

We'll have to wait and see what happens. All I know is: heads are rolling, and one of my local papers had two typos on the cover a few days ago. My hope is that people will enjoy dumbed down journalism or tabloid entertainment for what it is, but recognize that citizen journalism and the internet are tools for increased education and enlightenment and choose a nice balance in their lives. Namaste, readers.