iPad may be a lesser evil

Finally, my inaugural Journalism 120 Blog post comes after much anticipation, haha.

It’s very unfortunate—true, but unfortunate—that print journalism is dying. Newspapers and magazines are great media for news and entertainment, and I try to support print publications any way I can. I currently subscribe to the SF Chronicle, Sports Illustrated, and Electronic Gaming Monthly. I wish I had the monetary means and the time to subscribe to more publications. Papers and magazines are such a great part of American history and have done so much to shape our culture and our country. It’s saddening to think that in a couple decades they may not exist anymore (leastwise not in an unadulterated form).

As great as the Internet has been making human life easier and in some ways richer, it has inevitably led to a great amount of apathy in several forms. Internet retailers were cute when they stared up at the turn of the century, but are now out of control and killing many retailers that are important to the local economy. The very same is happening with print journalism. The convenience of online news and entertainment is becoming too much for print publications to successfully combat. But the biggest issue is that people do not want to pay for things they can get elsewhere for free. This puts magazines, newspapers, and the journalists who write for them, in a tough spot.

There are few things I enjoy more than having an evening to sit down with a magazine and reading an interesting personal profile on a star baseball player or an interview with a big game developer. This is the sort of journalism I love, and there are less and less opportunities for journalists to do this type of reporting for magazines and other print publications.

In my journalism 110 class there was brief mention of a new idea to increase revenue for magazines and papers that I actually liked. As much as I detest the iPad, e-readers, and other tablet devices, I would detest them less if they were the saving grace of newspapers and magazines. The new idea involves creating digital publications that are exclusively for tablet devices. While this is not quite as good as buying print issues, anything that makes people spend MONEY (emphasis on “money) on journalistic content is a good thing and should be encouraged.