There’s now a newspaper that’s all news and no paper.
News Corporation’s new product The Daily is the first newspaper to be designed solely for the iPad. Earlier this month, AOL announced plans to spend over $300 million to purchase The Huffington Post, a news website. “Born digital” journals are quickly outstripping those that are “born print.” Blogs and Tweets are being hailed as the medium of revolution.
Avery Rome, the deputy managing editor for writing and projects at The Philadelphia Inquirer, believes that “crowdsourcing” — or news from the general population found through social media — is not necessarily a bad thing. As she sees it, online news offers an efficient and easy way to get news.
The Daily Pennsylvanian’s Executive Editor and College junior Lauren Plotnick agrees. Frequently, Plotnick said, online sources such as Twitter may be able to offer special perspectives on news because they can be “right there when it happens.”
When Wharton and Engineering freshman Shreeya Goel had a blog for her writing seminar, she found herself relying on the blog as her primary news source. Most topics covered “common knowledge” news, she said, but even if she read a surprising fact, she admitted that she probably would not look for other sources.
The average Penn student “gets his or her information online,” Undergraduate Assembly President and College senior Matt Amalfitano wrote in an e-mail. In his experience, breaking news is often found through social media, not through affiliated news sources.
Penn Libraries Director of Public Services Marjorie Hassen and Martha Brogan, director of collection development and management, agreed with Amalfitano. In the past 20 years, the library has tried to cater to the student preference for online resources and added over 500,000 e-book subscriptions compared to less than 100,000 print volumes.
Carlin Romano, critic-at-large for the The Chronicle of Higher Education, originally resisted changing from a print to an online writer. But as print papers shrank and online papers grew, Romano found that online media offered unique freedom and opportunities.
For Plotnick, the job of the newspaper has changed. As she explained, newspapers used to have the job of breaking news as soon as events occurred. Now, she said, there is more “emphasis on analysis and dictating the news.”
According to Plotnick and Rome, the news consumer is changing. Though the internet might bring fast and easy news, people are starting to dislike the extra researching and fact-checking it takes to get a more well-rounded perspective online, Plotnick said.
As Rome sees it, the “level of scrutiny” necessary for a complete news story can — and should — only be provided by an investigative reporter.
Investigative reporters have an obligation to police society, Rome added. They provide “careful scrutiny of the institutions that govern our lives.”
College newspapers especially have had to deal with the growing role of online news. According to Yale Daily News Editor in Chief Vivian Yee, her newspaper is able to post stories online when the news breaks. These “online exclusives” are then “updated and published in the next day’s paper,” Yee wrote in an e-mail.
The Yale Daily News is also affiliated with a blog, “Cross Campus,” that “is updated throughout the day with posts on campus and city news items.” Every day’s paper contains snippets from “Cross Campus.” Although Yee believes that “print and online news are equally valuable and informative,” she understands that online media offers unique capabilities.
“At the News, we think of our website as the place to supplement, update and comment on what appears in the print paper,” Yee wrote. The online version of The Yale Daily News is designed to follow the layout of the print version, so that the readers can “take advantage of the abundance of content” without being overwhelmed.
Online versions might solve many problems, Amalfitano wrote. Last spring, the UA decided to cut the New York Times Readership Program — through which it provided students with free copies of the Times — because of rising costs and low readership.
The internet may be to blame, Amalfitano wrote.
Romano said that online newspapers have changed how news is perceived. The online reader is an active reader, Romano explained, because “you do have to overtly choose everything that you want to read.”
