Eons ago, in the mid 1970s, the basic journalism class required of anyone in the College of Journalism at University of Florida taught news writing as a means of conveying information efficiently to readers who were most likely to skim. This meant that the structure of a hard news story would load as many essentials as possible near the top, including the headline. That way, if a reader was just glancing over the pages, the headlines would provide a summary of the subject matter, and each article's lede paragraph would convey the most important content.
Throughout the era of printed paper, the format held up. The ads had their part of the page and the news and features filled the rest. Front pages had little or no advertising. The purpose of a newspaper was to convey the news. It was a point of pride. Papers might have a known editorial bias, but the straight news was served straight, under headlines that might be downright dry. Cynically, you could say that it didn't matter to the publishers if anyone actually read the news, as long as the advertisers thought that enough people did to make it worth buying ad space. In other words, the paper was prepaid.
As soon as "pages" became digital images that wouldn't appear until a reader asked for them, advertisers had a sure-fire way to audit actual views. Journalistic outlets now desperately needed readers to click though. The clickbait headline was born.
The problem is: people still skim the same way they did. Many of us are even reluctant to click through because the ads fill our devices with trackers and other garbage that we'd rather avoid. Lots of us navigate in a world informed only by inflammatory and misleading headlines composed purposely to upset us. In addition, journalistic standards had already slipped due to the influence of broadcast media and the shift to news as a business rather than a public service.
Granted, journalism has always been used as a way to control and direct opinion about issues important to the publisher. As more persuasive media evolved, they increased opportunities for nefarious actors, against which the stolid and factual reporting has little chance. Printed papers had greater resistance to corrupting influences, and a much wider reach than their audited circulation and projected secondary readership could ever capture. A printed page could blow around for weeks or longer, falling under the gaze of an unimaginably diverse audience for free. Now everything is TV, or at least viewed on a screen, almost obliterated by commercial messages.
The visual dominance of ads emerged in glossy magazines in the 1980s as a harbinger of the trash we have to hack through today to view or read the content we actually wanted. Bike and outdoor magazines in the 1970s were nerdy, with an obvious division between the editorial content and the ads. By the mid 1980s, it was getting hard to tell the difference between ads and articles. Mainstream consumer magazines had gone ad-heavy long before that. But at least in a printed publication you could flip past those pages risking nothing more than a paper cut if you were exceptionally clumsy and unlucky. In digital format, you have to keep whacking back the pop-ups, and you'll still be trailed afterwards by targeted supplicants reaching for your credit card based on an algorithm's perception of your desires.
In this digital age, another problem plagues journalists and readers alike: Is your browser up to date? I'm writing now on a MacBook from 2009. The browser is Firefox, updated as far as it can be. It is slow and lots of pages don't load correctly. I keep scanning idly for a newer used unit, but computer companies keep trying to collect and control their clientele, so the newest of the new may come with numerous sturdy strings attached. Windows computers come with nothing but teasers pre-installed, requiring you to use their cloud services and pay to subscribe to the software itself.
My other option is a 2019 Lenovo that was so slow from the git-go that just booting it up is a chore. I cleaned out a lot of the crap that was dragging it down, but it will never be blazingly fast or fully trustworthy. So that leaves me with my phone. A lot of people use their phones for everything. I use it for more and more because the apps generally work more smoothly, but sometimes I need a bigger screen and a real keyboard. So my connection to the flow of digital information-- and I'm sure I'm not alone in this -- breaks up often.
Print media are still available, with all of their old limitations and then some. I live in a rural area, so good coverage of news at any level has always been hard to find. Someone has to get the story, and a publication has to have space to print the story. The town I live in is between the coverage areas of several papers, so it gets mentioned in passing if at all, except when something exciting happens. Then that item is all that makes the news. Localized web coverage, mostly on social media, is so filled with personal rancor that it soon becomes too stressful to read. Ignorance truly is bliss. In fact, bliss is impossible without it.
Printed matter needed paper. Paper generally came from trees. Cutting trees means cyclic or permanent deforestation, depending on what investors decide to do with the land from which the trees were taken. Investors are looking for profit, not sustainability. If a piece of farmland or timberland will fetch a fat profit being stripped for a housing development or an industrial park, say goodbye to the trees, and don't ask where your food will be grown or your groundwater will percolate.
Digital media depends on a steady supply of functional devices that the manufacturers are falling all over themselves to make obsolete as quickly as they come out. "Built to last" isn't even a selling point anymore. A scrap of newspaper might be legible in fifty or a hundred years. Will an old computer still boot up? And if it does, and civilization still exists and functions, will it be able to connect to whatever the network is by then? Not in the current business model. And the business model is all we pay attention to anymore. Forget quality of life and acquisition of skill and knowledge for the overall improvement of humanity. Just rake in cash as much as you can.
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