Newspapers and magazines were a revolutionary technology around two centuries ago and they have been a respected media for years, but ever since the invention of the internet, they have been slowly fading into nonexistence. What newspapers boasted was the ability to look into local news, national news, and even looking for moving picture listings. The internet revolutionized this seemingly amazing invention, by placing all the movie listings, advertisements, and news could be made available “instantly”, just by pushing a few buttons, with no need to wait the next day to read “breaking news” from the previous day.
That was in the 1980s, the dawn of the internet, but now, in the 21st century, news comes in multiple forms, blogs, news websites, or even videos, media that excels in supplying easily absorbable chunks of information at a time. Whereas newspapers have not adapted all that much from their “forefathers”, the same premise has stayed, just local and national news from the previous day in their same form, sheets of recycle paper folded on top of each other. With evolved forms of technology now in our midst, such as smart phones and tablets that can read PDF files and access the internet on the go, newspaper’s argument of portability had been destroyed, because a 10 inch tablet or pocket sized smart phone will always be easier to carry, as well as having far more uses than just reading the news or finding sports scores.
The economic impact of having newspapers eradicated would decrease the national need to chop down trees and keep our environment as healthy as possible, as well as reducing the costs of printing millions if not billions of newspapers worth of ink and distributing the papers. When I talked to multiple students at South Pasadena High School, they all had the same general responses to the question, “do you read the newspaper?”, with “no, who reads the newspaper anyways? Just look it up on the internet.” Newspapers just don’t serve any purpose in America, with our available technology and amount of information available at an instant at our fingertips anytime, night or day. Who knows what might come next that would make tablets and smartphones what we think of newspapers today? Holograms?
