There was a time when the news came to us on horseback and carrier pigeon, then by telegraph and then by radio and newspaper. Now we have advanced to the point where we can watch the shuttle Challenger blowup on our television screen even as it happens. Through the advances in the computer and Internet we can get our news instantaneously from any part of the world. But is it always an advantage to have it come to us faster, with small sound bites, and with a picture, or is there still a place for acquiring our news from the newspaper?.
"Americans can become informed about the state of their society by tapping into any of hundreds of sources of rich, varied news and analysis- (Feder 55). They can get their economic, political, and cultural information from reading their local newspapers, their national newspapers, weekly magazines, and academic journals. They can listen to the public radio or even surf the Internet. "So the average American absorbs a broad stream of news and information, right? Wrong."" (Feder 55). According to the Media Research Center, seventy-two percent of the public "one hundred and ninety-two million people "listed TV as their primary source of news (Feder 55). Out of that seventy-two percent, forty-two percent of adults regularly watch one of the three TV networks' nightly news broadcasts, down from sixty percent in 1993 and more then ninety percent less than two decades ago. Only twenty-two percent of Americans under the age of thirty regularly watch network news while sixty-four percent of Americans over the age of sixty-five do ("Old News- 32). .
In comparison, an amazing 80.8 percent of all American adults read the paper daily in 1994 while in 1997 that number went down to 58.3 percent (Gapler). That number continued to drop until in 2001 it was 53.5 percent (NAA Article). The Newspaper Association of America was formed to help struggling newspapers. Now numbers are up slightly.
