The Southerner Journal

MONTICELLO, Ark. — I recently attended the Associated Collegiate Press/College Media Advisers annual conference in Kansas City, Mo. Students seemed worried that the media as we know it will not be there once they get out of school.

Who’s to blame them considering the continual death tolls:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/business/media/29carr.html

Considering we’ve just gone from three national daily newspapers to two, who’s to provide the news if the profits from the print product disappear? Who’s to say the Christian Science Monitor won’t figure it out?

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1029/p25s01-usgn.html

But just when everyone says newspapers are dying, along comes a historical event and EVERYBODY wants a paper:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/06/obama.newspapers.ap/index.html

Personally I believe newspapers will stay around as long as smaller communities exist, and as long as people need something to read while taking public transportation, going to the bathroom or sitting under a tree. Truly, time will tell.

by Ronald Sitton

I use the news to teach current events and writing. But occasional comment can be called for; I cannot resist.

1.Project Censored - Read about the Top 10 stories the media missed last year. It’s an annual exercise in wondering who’s pressuring whom to keep things out of the news.

2. National Broadband - About the only way rural America can compete will be for everyone to access high-speed Internet at a reasonable cost. We did it with electricity and the telephone; we need it to save what’s left of the homesteads and reinvigorate the Southern United States.

3. Another Death Toll - And though it’s a little old, this from the sportswriter/commentator Peter King of Sports Illustrated, who laments the collapse of the newspaper industry as we know it as told through the eyes of Tony Kornheiser:

I called Kornheiser, who told me he could still make a deal with the Post to allow him to write occasionally for the paper. But he was fairly fatalistic about the industry. “Newspapers aren’t dying,'’ he said. “They’re dead. But was it a sad day when the guys who made the great buggywhips and the beautiful classic carriages saw the first cars rolling off the assembly line? No. It was progress.'’

I’ll disagree, in this vein: The morning won’t be the morning for me without a paper with my Cheerios. But his point is valid. We’re just getting the news delivered in a different way. Kornheiser is like me — a ‘net devotee. As long as there are good reporters working out here, he thinks all is not lost.

“What would be terrible is if we didn’t have good reporters still out there,” he said. “I fear more that reporters who do the persistent grunt work may not be there.'’

King and Kornheiser make the point that media as we know it has changed. More important than the corporations owning the major media outlets, I believe it’s the fact everybody owns their own press with Internet blogs.

True, we need people getting the facts so that everyone can come to some agreement over what the facts might be. However, we enter an age when anyone can witness and record the facts. If that’s the case, who do you believe?