As reported yesterday by Random Pixels in Miami Herald moves to a new building…again, our hometown newspaper continues to downsize.  Is anyone surprised?  I know I’m not.  I stopped my daily subscription to the Herald over a year ago, and only kept weekend delivery for Sunday’s crossword puzzle and coupons.  The rest of the paper lines the kitty litter boxes.  Any articles worth reading, I find online.

The same way that technology has made many jobs obsolete (think Sunpass), the internet certainly helped kill the newspaper business.  In a way that can only be described as Epic Fail, newspapers that refused to acknowledge the competition are now finding themselves as obsolete as toll booth collectors.

The decline of investigative journalism also contributed to the newsprint failure.  There’s even a website called Newspaper Death Watch with the tagline, “Chronicling the Decline of Newspapers and the Rebirth of Journalism.”  Already gone are local newspapers such as the Baltimore Examiner, Cincinnati Post and the San Juan Star.   Icons like the Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit News/Free Press are on life support.  That our own Miami Herald is on its way downhill is no surprise to me.

However, today’s Random Pixels column, Long-time Miami TV news reporter is Exhibit ‘A’ why no one should work in TV news for very long, reports that technology isn’t the only reason newspapers are dying.  The growth of the television news business has created an entire MTV generation of people, with the attention span of gnats, who prefer their news as entertainment and recited to them in sound bites of 90 seconds or less.  Television news is the ultimate example of style over substance.  As RP pointed out, television journalists don’t even bother to research the details of the stories they regurgitate on camera.  Like MTV, it’s all about the ratings.

I have my own theories about the sorry state of newspaper and television journalism, not the least of which is the de-emphasis on spelling and grammar in today’s teach-to-the-test method of education being forced on teachers and their clueless students.  Because of the rise of virtual classrooms and now the Common Core Standards, live teachers are being phased out of education in the mad rush to “graduate” as many students as possible by sinking the bar to the lowest common denominator.  Education has become nothing more than a business, and children are commodities with which to trade school letter grades for dollars.  Little Johnny can’t read?  No problem.  Give him a Participation Trophy and graduate him anyway.  He’ll make a great reporter!

But, I digress.

As Random Pixels lamented, “reporters” are no longer journalists who bother to do their homework.  And those who rely solely on television (or even the internet) for their news have helped contribute to the death of traditional newspapers.  The bigger misfortune, in my opinion, is that investigative journalism is a lost, and sorely missed, art.

Then again, if reporters actually did their jobs, you wouldn’t need bloggers like Random Pixels.  Or even VotersOpinion.  So, I guess I shouldn’t complain.

Stephanie Kienzle
“Spreading the Wealth”