Harsh Future

Before college, I never really read too many newspapers, other than The Times Herald Record, which is the local paper from home (Sullivan County), mostly because I didn't always have internet access, and I really never had the urge to.

However, since becoming a journalism major at SUNY Albany, I am much more interested in the news, and papers like The New York Times and U.S.A. Today, and magazines like Newsweek, are now at the top of my list whenever I want to find information out. I even subscribe to the New York Times online, which is somewhat of a rip off to the company, since I read for free. I get daily emails and also news alerts whenever something big happens (like for instance, today, which read:

"After a half-day of animated debate, the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday rejected efforts by liberal Democrats to add a government-run health insurance plan to major health care legislation, dealing the first official setback to an idea that many Democrats, including President Obama, say they support."

That makes me sad, especially after the event I attended that I spoke about in my last post. People were just so passionate about that issue, and to see it fall through is somewhat depressing.

But I didn't write to talk about that, even though it's obviously something big, and something I care about, because to be honest, real reporters are going to be covering that much more extensively than I am going to be.

I guess I'm really more interested in the fact that I get the New York Times for free each day. At first, maybe it doesn't seem like something interesting, compared to public option being rejected, but to someone like me, who plans on (hopefully) graduating in the spring, it affects me in a really big way.

Newspapers are dying. It's a simple truth that every professor here agrees on. Some of the older ones say journalism itself is dying, but the other ones say that it will never die. The style is transforming, and the way news is gathered and distributed is changing.

So I get The New York Times for free, which means people aren't getting paid. No salary for the writers, for the editors, for the deliverymen, for the ink, for the paper. Only the people who pay for that actually help it, and if someone who has internet gets the choice to choose free news or the actual paper delivered to their doorstep for $7.40 a week, I'm pretty sure they'd choose free.

This isn't new information by any means, but it is the reality, and it is scary. The future of my career field has no security whatsoever at this point, until something is done. There was a really good article written by the editor of The San Jose Mercury News that I read a couple of weeks ago about it, but of course, now I have to pay for it. I wish I could show it to you. (Maybe if my sister reads this, she can put a link up or something. She is the one who showed it to me after all.)

It's a terrifying reality that's hitting me in the face everyday, making me wonder what I'm doing even attempting traveling down this road. Hopefully, something good will happen, and make my worrying go away, but if it doesn't, who knows what will happen?

I know I've been really lazy with my writing in this blog, and as always, I apologize profusely. I never mean to wait this long between posts, because I love writing in it, but with six classes, balancing priorities is becoming quite a task. Just don't give up on me yet. I'm not going anywhere.