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“Without newspapers what will we know?”

Guest speaker Bob Wigginton used this quote numerous times in his presentation on Friday to stress the importance of newspaper journalism. This is a man who is obviously very passionate about newspapers. After an hour of hearing what he has to say about the future of the newspaper industry, it is easy to see why.

According to Wigginton, the forecast for newspapers is bleak. With six-thousand journalists laid off at major newspapers within the last two years and more layoffs likely to come, the future of journalism is certainly questionable.

So what’s the difference? Why does it matter if newspapers go under?

Well, like Wigginton said, “without newspapers what will we know?” According to him, newspaper journalists are the source of most, if not all, of the news we receive through the various media outlets. Without newspapers we might not get an unbiased perspective on politicians and government actions. There may be no investigative reports to uncover corruption or crimes.

Newspapers have shown through their history that they can certainly make a difference. Wigginton gave examples of journalists uncovering the Watergate scandal with President Nixon and Clinton’s shipping prisoners to other countries for torture. Without investigative newspaper reporters, would we have ever found out about these scandals? Probably not.

So where does that leave newspapers? With all the cutbacks right now, newspapers are moving to backpack journalism where the reporter must also control any video and audio aspects of reporting. This makes it difficult for the reporter to focus on the story and the important issues.

This is not the only change expected in the newspaper business. With fewer and fewer people reading the physical paper news it is likely that newspapers will move to be solely online. Some see this as a scary change or a bad thing, but it’s obvious that the whole world is moving in that direction. I really don’t see the difference between news in a paper and news online. It’s easier to get a hold of and environmentally friendly to read news on the internet.



Wigginton summed it up best when he said, “Journalism will never die, we will continue to seek information it will probably just change form.”