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Hot Topic by Rose Hoffman Toubes With today's media fractionalization and the coming of age of the first generation of video consumers, I believe newspapers as we know them - those crisp broadsheets of foldable "hard copy" accompanied by amazingly decent digitized color photos lavished on Canadian wood pulp - will be gone in a quarter century or less. The deployment of state-of-the-art presses and the noble gestures of recycling and soy inks notwithstanding, who is going to read the newspapers of the future? Who is going to read, period? That's the larger question some of us in academia have been asking. And we're not alone. The remarkable ubiquity of the Internet has raised the "print doomsday issue" once again to a fevered pitch much like the one caused by television. Those sage bastions of nonfiction - like Harper's and The New York Review of Books, among others - have been doing their fair share of recent worrying. And rightfully so. When today's readers visit that heavenly reading room, will there be generations of readers here on earth to take their place? And not only readers of pulp fiction, of grocery store romances and airport thrillers, but readers for democracy, readers who care about the environment and human rights and world politics? With their breadth and depth of coverage, I believe top newspapers and print news magazines are the only media forms that can truly accomplish this global literacy for the average citizen.
Though the demise of newsprint is inevitable, I find myself a staunch defender of the newspaper realm, more for the kinds of readers and thinkers it develops. "Read a newspaper today. Save the world tomorrow," I say. This self-coined maxim is what motivates my efforts to have all of my composition students - nearly 125 each semester - subscribe to a paper for the entirety of our term together. But my purpose is ultimately a more pragmatic one. Newspapers perform a critical role in teaching students how to master their own language. "Most of what you need to know about writing is in here," I tell my students as I hold up a copy of The New York Times. Four dimes a day brings them the world. But I'm not sure they want it - even at sharply reduced student rates. At least not in newsprint...er...dinosaur form. Maybe not at all. The litany of their complaints is predictable, endless, valid even: We do not have time to read long stories, they say. If we want news, we can listen to the radio, watch TV or surf for headlines and updates. We have families (and cars) to support, too much homework, not enough space for newspapers in our lives, not enough patience to read long stories from beginning to end. We don't need all the details. Just the gist. Right now we don't care about the rest of the world that much. We have our own lives. Save the trees. And newsprint gets our fingers dirty, thank you very much. Still, my students - eager for three hours of credit - dutifully snip and paste to create their own newspaper grammar guides full of hyphens, dashes, colons, semicolons, participial phrases, colorful leads, literary allusions. They complete vocabulary notebooks. They respond to articles and editorials. They analyze reporters' research methods. And some begin to really read the paper. Not because I make them. Others, regrettably, lack the comprehension skills to tackle a print behemoth like The New York Times. They have spent a lifetime not confronting any more print than necessary. Perhaps I am trying too hard to insinuate my newspaper habit on my students, a reading habit that needs to be nourished in the home over a lifetime. A decade ago many of my students said they came from families where a newspaper subscription was as much a part of daily life as a loaf of bread. Today fewer of my students recall newspapers having been regularly available in their homes. And yet Gannett must have cause for optimism. The economic decisions behind The Des Moines Register's new printing operation presume a century of future newspaper readers, at least. Or maybe what newspapers are doing these days is merely keeping their "brand" alive, their teams of trusty news-gatherers intact for the time when they will mostly exist online. I think future "readers" will access a variety of media for display on wall-sized screens or handheld palm readers - a melange of point-and-click customized audio, video and print packages based on individual preference. And possibly, a few of us will still be able to download the news of our choice and print it on paper in a type size that corresponds to our visual acuity. Do I stew over the proliferation of TV news magazines and sensationalized reality-based programming that seem to reduce the world to glib entertainment at the expense of genuine knowledge? I suppose I do. As an educator I am striving to cultivate a motivated, critical-thinking citizenry, and I will have to continue to do so using the best media available and by requiring my students to read deeply and well.
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