Steve Yorio's response to "democracy needs newspapers. and better reporters"

I certainly agree with the idea that newspapers are a key aspect of our democracy. I feel this way because giving citizens the chance to speak their minds and say how they feel is a major part of what makes this country. It allows them the chance to express their freedoms of speech and press. Indeed newspapers serves as a source in which people can do this but freedom comes with consequences. Newspaper readers must always be on their toes when perusing the pages because, since people have the freedom to say as they please (within reason), there is an overwhelming potential for bias statements to be made. Bias statements create false beliefs for readers. Those reading reports need to have a strong desire to seek the truth before they simply believe what they hear.

You are definitely right when you say people do not appreciate all the things local newspapers do for a community, but we must remember that we are entering a new age of information accumulation. Even though the Princeton University study stated that fewer candidates ran for municipal office after the death of the Cincinnati Post, there could be multiple reasons for this occurrence rather than the mere fact that the town‘s newspaper was shut down. It is true that, without local newspapers, a lot of information is lost because most papers do not post their stories on the internet, and the information of every local city cannot possibly be covered in one national newspaper. If every city was covered in one national paper, or even fifty national newspapers, it would not be humanly possible to read it in one day, unless you were Will Hunting.

It is true that the reporting would decrease for things such as crime because of the fact that a national paper, or even a state paper, or a website could not report on every bit of criminal activity that happens in each city. Topics such as crime would not be covered nearly as in depth as they are today, but in my personal opinion this is not such a bad thing. I find a lot of information that I read about in newspapers to be somewhat frivolous. I think it is pointless to publish things like minor crimes, rather, reporting them in local paper is only necessary if these crimes are harming or affecting fellow citizens in any way, shape or form; often times they are not. Since we have recently progressed into this so called ‘digital age,’ I feel there must be a better, easier way to provide citizens with the information of their local worlds.