summed up

This week was all about Fred and Freud, and this is most apparent in everyone's blog posts for this week. However, having written two separate blog posts on the subjects this week already, I would like to address an issue brought up in some, but not a whole lot, blogs this week that was not covered or discussed in class, which is the topic of the rise of newspapers and mass publications. Elizabeth casts a sort of negative tone on the rise of newspapers because they allowed writers to twist the original ideas of great thinkers such as Darwin and Freud into what the writer saw fit for either making a point or simply selling a paper. Mia compares the situation of newspapers in the early 20th century to the situation of newspapers today. In both cases, I feel that newspapers and journalism need a little defending and not necessarily for the authors of those posts but for society in general.

The fact that a major city newspaper, such as the Chronicle, may be closed is tragic, at least to me. For years, readers have depended on good writers to unearth stories and dedicate time into writing expository pieces meant to educate the greater public of the "goings-on". Now, however, people can receive their news in a flash. Little to no thought has to be put into an online notice or video compared to the toil Woodward and Bernstein would have put into an article. Because the newspaper is dying out, journalists have less and less opportunity to show their true skills or have their discoveries and thoughts as widely read as before. If this is to be the case, and people eventually only rely on very short video snippets to get the entirety of their news, what will become of journalism? Despite what Elizabeth says on how it was potentially dangerous, journalism has often served a lot of good in society. For example, we learned that Morel was able to discover what was really happening in the Congo during Imperialism and publish his findings of the atrocities. It would have taken time, effort, and a lot of investigation to get to the bottom of that story. If newspapers die out, will there be anymore Morels? Will there be any room for investigative journalism? Will quality articles that take weeks or months to write become irrelevant next to other means of receiving news almost instantaneously over the internet? While journalists may sometimes want to push an agenda or sell papers, I think that the death of the art form would be a major loss to the world and the way we understand it.