The way I have viewed newspapers my entire life has been as something that my grandpa reads; a stack of paper somewhat like a book, that comes in an inconvenient form with nothing interesting enough inside that would compel me to attempt to keep those papers together long enough for me to read them. One would assume that as I got older my perception of the newspaper would change, but I never even thought about it because from age 13 and on I was getting news feeds from the internet. Everything that I ever read in a magazine or a newspaper I had read a day earlier online, with an additional option of reading what people felt about the particular going-ons of our world.
I started reading newspapers this summer, when my friend and I were traveling and found ourselves in situations where we didn’t have access to the internet, such as trains and hostels in foreign countries, but we did always find a newspaper written in English. This is the year I started to read newspapers for pleasure. Something changed in me where I would rarely check blogs, Yahoo! News, or even TV any more; when I returned to New York I was picking up papers from the newspaper boxes on the sides of the streets, something that would have before been seen as out-of-character. The difference between blog and internet news and newspapers is that on the internet everything is so instant, you don’t get the time to absorb what is really going on. If there are five large events of the day posted on a blog or a website, that will likely be the furthest into the entirety of the news that the reader will peruse.
In a newspaper, I physically feel how much more there is to go, so it is more likely I will sit there, page by page, and read at least the headlines of interest.
This week when I picked up the Village Voice I read a 4-page article on Cedar Grove in Staten Island, and how the city plans to open it to the public after years of it being a private and local vacation area. The Staten Island local blog ‘Silive,’ told the entire story in a one page article with a single photo. The Village Voice told the same story, with more detail complete with a 4-page spread and single-page size photos of the area in order to give the reader a sense of the place.
The difference in the ledes is apparent. Silive opens with, “The city Parks Department said it plans to remake a large, privately leased stretch of New Dorp Beach and open it to the public -- effectively ending for 41 families a long tradition of summering on the shores of Staten Island” While the Village Voice makes it more of an emotional issue stating, “Way out on the south shore of Staten Island, just north of a wastewater treatment plant and past a scrappy section of beach, lies a quiet, tucked-away community known as the Cedar Grove Beach Club. If you didn’t have reason to go there – and fewpeople do – you wouldn’t even know it existed. For literally a century the members of Cedar Grove Beach Club were happy to keep it that way.”
Ironically, the Village Voice seems to be taking more of a Feature Story take on this while the blog actually seems more professional.
A benefit that blogs do have over paper, is the option of linking and clicking around. If you are reading a newspaper, it is a single person event, you are not linked to the other number of people reading the same newspaper, the only opinion that matters at that time is yours. On a blog, if a person is referencing an event in their story, you can click right on to where their cite came from. Even if something is mentioned, and you don’t know very much about it, that single word can be put in a different font so that when you click on it you enter a whole new world of information. Additionally, if a person doesn’t know what to make of a story he or she can check and see what other people had to say in the comment section below each and every online news post.
Consequently, blogs can be distracting, which brings us back to the problem of not being able to absorb what is being told. I prefer internet and blogging mostly because it is what I’m used to, which makes me wonder, do today’s youth even think of picking up a newspaper?
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