Before the Ink Dries

Progress is humanity’s greatest weapon against time. It is the reason we live in houses instead of caves, use telephones instead of smoke signals, and drive in cars instead of on horseback. Essentially, this type of natural progression eliminates wasted time and effort, delivering a new level of convenience with every new step forward.

While the concept of a print newspaper isn’t necessarily from the Stone Age, it can be added to a growing list of familiar practices and customs suffering from the expansion of the Internet. And, just as the cave’s evolution to the brick home, the print newspaper is experiencing a natural development in the form of online news.

And just as I can’t think of reasons why I’d rather live in a cave than the warm comfort of my house, there is an absence of setbacks in this line of progression. On a basic level, online news is faster. Reading more into that, however, reveals the augmentation of accessibility. Whereas the paper would lay pressed, overloaded, and threatening to the casual high school or college-age reader, online news appears in comfortable, familiar layouts, complete with “search” functions and straightforward headings to lead the reader to the article or topic they desire. Increased readership is just one key feature among online news sources.

Websites like Yahoo! and MSN offer breaking news coverage right on their homepage as users check their email or participate in search engine features. The articles are archived, ready to be accessed tomorrow, or three years from now. Gone are the complex layouts of print papers, where pages had to be ruffled through, and only libraries carried the archives of print.
This evolution is not a scary thing, despite what websites like Demiseofprint.com might try to publicize. The same basic principles, the same journalistic codes (implying employed journalism, not citizen journalism, which is another topic for another time), and the same purposes are quite evident in the new-fangled online news sources. Rather, this progression takes what we had, and enhances every aspect in regard to time, effort, and convince, just as progression should.

I don’t find frightening the fact that my children will be accustomed to reports so current that “today’s news” will become obsolete before the ink dries. Come to think of it, print newspapers seem almost as outdated as yesterday’s news…

- Amir Hamizadeh