[Note: Part I, The Waning of Print Media appeared in the January 2009 issue.]
Though paper-and-ink newspapers seem to have permanently lost some of their appeal, it's clear people are still getting their news and getting it regularly. 24-hour cable news channels are one of the modern sources. But far more popular are Internet news sources.
Increasingly, traditional newspapers--not just most but all of the biggest American ones--are offering subscribers the option of receiving their news in either print or online formats. And why not: the advantage to the publisher is decreased production cost, decreased need to maintain large, noisy, high-maintenance plants, and decreased need to hire certain types of workers.
Along the way, not just the format but the news itself has been altered.
One of the most obvious changes is typical story length. Online users, who may be reading the news on the tiny screen of a cell phone or PDA, or quickly scanning the headlines during a short coffee break at work, have a need for shorter text. It makes sense to deliver the most pertinent parts of a story and skip the details that readers would be most likely to deem irrelevant or merely tangential.
That's not to say that online news is, as a rule, less than accurate. It simply must be more tightly condensed. For those readers who want to dig deeper, publishers often use hyperlinks within a story's text to make previous or parallel stories immediately available. "Linking" in paper form can only be done with detail right in the story text. Though this often results in artfully written stories, it doesn't lend itself to limited space.
And it seems changes run in the other direction also, with printed news adopting some of the language typical of online news. That includes increasingly casual word choice. It seems to me these kinds of changes are a direct result of our growing love affair with the immediacy of online coverage. On-the-spot reporting, whether received online or in print, is likely to be less formal in presentation than a carefully polished one delivered hours or days later.
While we may rightfully mourn the apparent loss of verbal artistry immediate news coverage suffers, there is an up side. A much more deeply niched audience can be reached, at much lower cost, through online outlets. People with interests in very specific areas are more likely to find the latest information on a news site specific to that field than they would in their more generalized local print news. In these niche news outlets, a whole different jargon may be part of the reporting norm.
Online news, then, may employ either more or less diverse language than print news. An unexpected lexical paradox!
© 2009 by AnnaLisa Michalski