WHY I DON'T READ THE NEWSPAPER

I have heard many people make comments along the lines of, “I am so uninformed because I just never have time to read the newspaper” or “I don’t have time to read the newspaper, and therefore, I don’t know what is happening in our world.” These remarks have always been peculiar to me because I hardly ever read the newspaper, but I still consider myself “informed”. I was tired of people somehow linking my duty to be an informed citizen with the amount of time I spend reading a newspaper. I’m a digital learner, and I don’t need a cup of coffee and a newspaper to inform me about what is happening around me.

But instead of dismissing those who think a newspaper is linked to my duty to be an informed citizen, I went on a quest. I took the day off, and instead of working, I actually read my local newspaper (The Indianapolis Star) all the way through. I decided to read every word of every story just so that I could find out what I was missing. Not only did I read every article, but I also went through and calculated what percentage of the newspaper is dedicated to advertisements. I wanted to know if, by not reading the newspaper, whether I was missing news or if I was missing advertisements. I went through every page of the paper and blocked each advertisement and calculated the total surface area of the all the advertisements in the paper just to see how much marketing penetration there is in a newspaper.

So, what did I find out?

First, I found out that 46% of the main section of the paper consisted of advertisements. That is almost half of the total content devoted to ads! Clearly, those of you who haven’t been reading the newspaper have really just been missing lengthy, printed commercials as opposed to high quality content. I also found that 24% of the “metro and state” section and 4% of the “sports” section contained advertisements. Needless to say, 100% of the “classifieds” section contained ads.

It was very odd to discover that the sports section contained so little advertisement space. I assumed that this section would have the most adds because when people get the paper, the first section I see them go to is the sports section. Nobody really cares about which African Tribal Leader has over-thrown a national government, but we all need to know how our fantasy teams are doing.

But after reading the section a little more, I came to realize that sports and marketing are so incredibly interrelated that it is difficult to distinguish between the two. I mean, I knew there was advertising in sports, but when I read the entire section, I came to see just how extensively permeated the sports section is with implicit advertisements. There are team logos, beer-sponsored stadiums, and corporate slogans that are a part of almost all of the articles in the section. This made me wonder how much “incentive” may be provided to media outlets for displaying this information, but I haven’t done any research to find out. Also, I am not mad that there is marketing in the sports section. I will still go to that section and read up on my favorite teams and I am as much of a sucker for the entertainment as anyone else. But let’s not kid ourselves by thinking that a failure to read the newspaper is a failure of our civic duty to be informed.

After conducting this lengthy investigation, I came up with three significant conclusions:

1.Most of the content in a newspaper is boring. It just wasn’t very relevant, and many of the articles seemed more speculative than conclusive. I am glad that I do not spend two hours a day reading the newspaper, and even though I only conducted this experiment for one day (limited sample size), I have no need or desire to gather more data on this point.

2. Newspapers contain low-quality information because they lack the perspective of TIME. Any event or situation that is worth knowing about elapses over a significant period of time (weeks, months, and even years), such as the war in Iraq. A newspaper, by its very nature, is limited in its ability to provide an in-depth analysis of a subject because of its time limitation. Every twenty-four hours, a new paper gets printed, and whatever information is available at the date of publication is all that can be contained in the article. Of course, a reporter can spend time investigating the article before they print, but almost none of the articles that I read were written from this vantage point. They were all short fragments of information that were so scattered and shallow as to make them inconclusive (and almost irrelevant) to any decision-making process.

3. The newspaper contained more entertainment than quality information, and this is because a newspaper is in the business of selling. They need to sell circulation, and what sells for a very broad, very generic reader base (the American public) is entertainment.

Finally, I would add that I have no problem with the production of the newspaper or its distribution. However, I do have a significant problem with those who suppose you need to read the newspaper in order to be informed. Please. All I have been missing over the years is long advertisements mixed in with the very occasional relevant story.

As a teacher, one of my primary responsibilities is to provide my students with high-quality information. When we explore, investigate, study, and learn, we should utilize high-quality information to aid this process. In the classroom, I think a newspaper source is considered a very reputable and informative piece of information, but that is just not true. I would argue that a newspaper reference has only slightly more credibility than Wikipedia. Not awful, but certainly not something I would use to make a significant decision.

The best way to get quality information is from books, research journals and articles, and word of mouth with people who know what the heck is going on. I would much rather talk to a person who fought over in Iraq than read 2000 articles about Iraq in my local newspaper.

If you agree or disagree, feel free to leave a comment. For now, I’m going off to read a book…

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“News is, and shall remain, an add-sponsored form of media”-Michael Wolff, founder of Newser, an online news/information aggregator

NEW DATA!!! Well, I investigated the sports section over the past two weekends, and the surface area devoted to ads was SIGNIFICANTLY higher. It was approximately 45% ads. I'm curious why this drops off to 4% during the week. Any thoughts?