Perhaps this is an unpopular opinion, but most significantly wealthy people I know read the newspaper (usually, several newspapers), and I think keeping up-to-date on the world around you is an important part of being a successful member of society (regardless of whether we define that as monetary, intellectual, etc). As such, I would have to say that this is really a gift to the 18 year olds.
I often try to explain to my friends in Northern Europe (who are in their late teens, early 20s) that the average American doesn't read the newspaper. They really don't believe me, but then they start to think about it and realize that this is one of the reasons we have such a ridiculous political system. When you have a large populace that doesn't read, their source of news is entirely through sound bites; thus, everything becomes dumbed down and sensational (for example, Howard Dean yells at an event and is suddenly no longer a viable political candidate? WTF?).
You can't have a working democracy in a land of illiterates.
Newspapers are in the business of selling ads. They only require you to buy the newspaper as a filter to make sure you don't take a newspaper without reading it.
I believe complacency to be more endemic than illiteracy in America. People consume news in a myriad of ways. Trying to say newspaper reading would resolve some problem is silly.
Perhaps newspaper reading is not so common and complacency is more widespread in the US, I don't know, but some forms of media are more suited for more in-depth analysis while others are not. I'd say that the newspapers format gives the publisher space enough to give needed details on subjects and the reader can peruse it in the speed one needs to comprehend and analyze it. Actually, this goes for most written media.
Of course, newspapers per se don't solve problems but I think that a literate people can make more informed decisions and thus have a greater chance on making good decisions.
Good journalists are good journalist, no matter which medium they use to distribute. You can find good journalism from professionals in print or online or even from bloggers. Going by your standard, every citizen should be required to read BOOKS in order to get the depth of analysis that they sorely need to be wealthy.
Wealth is neither here or there. Or did you mean intellectual wealth?
Well, I'd say that newspapers, in print or online, or blogs are all in writing. Thus more or less equal in potential power. There we seem to at least mostly agree.
I guess I was guessing that if people in the US didn't read newspapers they got at least some information from alternative sources. The ones I could quickly think of where all non-written, e.g. TV or youtube. Those would, in contrast to the written ones, generally not be as well suited for in depth analysis. My guess could, of course, be widely off.
Very droll. Still, I'd rather prop up an industry that's designed to inform, educate and expose corruption in the world, than prop up industries that do little but feed our unsustainable, consumptive habits.
Given that at least 50% of the compelling things I read on this site originated in the New York Times, it strikes me as more than a bit ironic that so many of the comments here are dismissing the unfortunate fate of the news media. All the social networks in the world won't make up for the loss of our newspapers.
Umm, the newspaper industry is designed to sell ads. The news (which is usually more accurately described as opinion) exists only to get your eyeballs in front of the ads.
Next you'll be telling me that Google is in the search business. Advertisers are Google's customers. You are Google's product.
"Still, I'd rather prop up an industry that's designed to inform, educate and expose corruption in the world, than prop up industries that do little but feed our unsustainable, consumptive habits."
Expanding on gaius' point, if they actually did those things more frequently, maybe they wouldn't need propping up. Instead they are actually "designed" to do the latter.
"Given that at least 50% of the compelling things I read on this site originated in the New York Times,"
I call foul. As I write this, there's one thing on the front page from there, and only 4 in the top 100. If that ratio is correct, you should stop reading HN and just cut straight to the NYT.
"if they actually did those things more frequently, maybe they wouldn't need propping up."
This sounds suspiciously like a version of the old "liberal media" complaint, but regardless, it's fundamentally wrong.
The news media is not failing because of some problem with the quality of its product -- it's failing because the web has made impression advertising so utterly worthless that it's becoming impossible to profitably maintain an advertising-supported business that provides professionally produced content to niche audiences.
That fails to explain why the newspaper business has been declining since before the web was a factor. It's been in decline for a very long time.
I've connected (like many around here) to many alternative news sources, and the fact is that newspapers have become superficial, fad-driven, fail to report on anything if it's "hard" (witness the lack of staffing of foreign offices), and incredibly beholden to narrative, which you can already see in Obama's coverage. (I don't know if the media is liberal-biased but it sure as hell is Obama-biased. The clearest example of this has been the treasury secretary nomination, which would have caused screams of outrage if Bush did it but a collective and fully conscious "meh" from an Obama nomination.)
There's a blogger ( http://michaeltotten.com/ ) who takes user donations and embeds himself with militaries in Iraq and more recently, Israel. He does better reporting than any newspaper or professional media organization, because they have zero such reporters. Zero. I always find it interesting when people criticize his reporting, because he is there and he is the only one there; nobody has any standing to criticize him. (I'd actually feel much better if there was.)
This has not always been true. Look at the beginning of Dan Rather's career. He wasn't the only one, either. Nobody does that anymore. Nobody from a newspaper, anyhow.
There are just so many stories they pass on because they don't want to report them (scandals in the wrong direction, mostly), or fundamentally can't understand them anymore (science reporting, I'm almost glad CNN dropped out because they were awful anyhow). Punditry has largely replaced facts (24-hour coverage may get eyeballs but it's a fundamentally bad, distorting idea). The media, as a whole, is simply awful. They are propaganda machines, and I'm not even just talking politics. Every time they write an article based on a press release (which is all the damn time), they're just propagandizing, not reporting.
It is possible that it is no longer possible for such entities to sustain such reporting, in which case the Totten model is probably the only hope for actual reporting going forward.
