Friday, March 21, 2014

Worth a Second Look - Newspapers

A seriously endangered species and is totally worth a second look!

Nowadays, most everyone gets their news from personalized feeds on their homepages on their phones and tablets.  Specifically targeting your interests, from who you support publicly to the kind of music you listen to, articles, op-eds and even advertisements are sent directly to you in order to fulfill your need to inquire about your own personal kind of news. The news you want to hear about and none of the fluff in between...

....but just think what you're missing.

Old fashioned newspapers are designed to provide you a complete set of informational articles on everything that is happening in your local community and the world.  Other than opinion pieces, the news should be reported and unbiased.  So even if you are not interested in the political malaise in Syria, at least you know there is something happening over there.  If you don't agree with John Smith's third page opinion column on how Steven Harper has handled the Senate scandal, at least he provided a perspective that makes you take a second look at the entire racket.  If you don't believe in global warming, maybe an article about how the lack of zoo-plankton due to warm ocean temperatures may be pushing the right whale to extinction may have you thinking twice.

You may not read everything or agree with it but you know that it's important.

It forces you to open your mind and think, and re-think, and then think again.

And the fluff isn't all that bad either.

You may not have know that your childhood friend's mother had passed away and if you hadn't caught it in the obituaries, you would never have rekindled that friendship.

The Saturday funnies and Wonderword with a cup of coffee in a Denby mug is my kind of weekend morning.

Sure newspapers are also good for gift wrap, cleaning, house training your puppy, providing employment for your son, lining your birdcage, starting your fire...etc but the importance of its societal existence is undeniable.  It educates in a way no micro-targeted electronic news feed can.

And besides, when you find a really old ripped out article in the middle of your grandmother's cookbook that was just passed down to you, it's just really cool to reflect on who she was and why she had kept it.

You can't do that with an Ipad.
 


 

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