I never would have thought that a local newspaper would have a fighting chance against such juggernaut publications as the New York Times and Washington Post, but after doing some research my opinion has changed completely. I realized that many people are more interested in what's going on closer to home than what some country's dictator has done on the other side of the world. Although I do feel it's a bit naïve to assume that no one cares about world issues, stories that actually affect our day-to-day lives are more personal. We want to read about things that interest us like the removal of that pesky neighborhood speed bump or the outcome of our local sports team's last game. It seems to me that while larger newspapers provide stories on a much more global scale, they are never the only ones to do so. Several large market papers are vying for a similar spot at the top. For this reason, websites and blogs will continue to update us on world news long after the Times and it's counter-parts have perished in print form. I get a lot of my national information from news-oriented magazines like the Week. I find the Week to be a more compelling read because it reports on important social and political issues in a unique way. Instead of printing only one article on a given story, it presents them by bringing together excerpts of conflicting opinions from different papers and websites. This helps to keep the news they report very neutral since they tend to have many different viewpoints on the same issue. I also enjoy how the Week has titled sections that are in each and every printing, making it easier for me to find the parts of the magazine that I know will interest me the most like reviews of film & art, or a collage of that week's best political cartoons.
Though interesting, and very popular, I don't think this magazine-like format that brings together many publications into one would thrive on a local level. It wouldn't work as well in my opinion simply because there are less people to write about the same stories when you are dealing with a significantly lower population. This will ensure that print forms of smaller papers live on while the larger ones are condensed and forced online. This video by a man named Nicholas Lemann makes a lot of sense to me and helped me form many of my opinions on print media.
As the popularity and demand for newspapers continues to decline, one or two of the wide-scale dominators will stand alone as our last links to a time since passed. A nostalgic look back to the days of having to choose which form of black and white print is our favorite.
In the end, the safer, more long-lasting side of newspapers will be found in rags such as the Dundalk Eagle or the Avenue News. These smaller town publications are more focused on issues that directly affect their publics and they will always be around to report the local news, however mundane and nationally meaningless it may be.
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