The "Press Sphere"

I never really think about the media as a business. I mean, it is kind of strange to think about people who’s jobs are to report on the lives of other people. Of course, I watched the news and read the paper growing up, and acknowledged news anchors and reporters, but thinking about the news as a living and functioning business with competition never occurred to me. After watching the documentary in class on Friday about the death of mainstream newspapers due to the presence of online sources brought that whole issue to the forefront of my brain. The newspapers has been such a constant in my life and to think that the traditional format of media is dying is depressing. 

Jeff Jarvis helped me formulate the reasoning behind the extinction of these newspapers and how news is much more than just reporting. News stories are functioning, growing and developing items that don’t die until the public becomes disinterested. The public has come to expect access to developing stories much quicker than once daily. For now, the daily front page’s news is usually outdated compared to the new information I can find online at the same time. Jarvis explains that the press sphere has moved beyond the reporter and has expanded the opportunity to write a “letter to the editor” to every article and news tidbit. With the ability to comment on online articles, eye-witnesses, fact checkers, and the government can all have a vocal say in the content of news. Individuals are no longer constrained to receiving their information from a handful of sources. 

I agree with Jarvis’ model with all the different outlets that we get news from, but I think that they are more disguised than his graph depicts. According to my classmates, it seems like we receive a lot of our news from second-hand sources rather than from the source and so the distinct circles that he depicts in his model may not be so concrete in my classmate’s individual source information graphs. 

However, even with the presence of online media, I can’t compare scrolling on a webpage to sitting in a coffee shop and turning the tangible pages of the paper. I hope that the paper stays alive. 

http://buzzmachine.com/2008/04/14/the-press-becomes-the-press-sphere/