Living today with no news is bad news

We’re all familiar with the Metro distributors who lurk on the main floor of the LRT building on campus, pushing their papers on unsuspecting students trying to get to class or go home. I often take one out of pity for the poor woman who usually works the transit station, idly flipping through a few pages on the bus home. Some students, however, dive behind the pay phones or push themselves as close to the wall as possible, trying to duck out of sight while she waves the paper in her hand, weakly asking no one in particular, “Free Metro? Free Metro?” Many of those she manages to corner shove past her to seek safety in HUB, panicking in the face of her mild desperation.

Recently, as I stood in the station, clutching the daily tabloid I’d felt obliged to take, I watched the woman in the green apron push a paper towards a girl and her friend. The girl, perfectly poised and cool, ignored her completely, saying to her friend, “I don’t read the news.” I was briefly tempted by the urge to march over and beat her over the head with the crumpled paper in my hands.

Our generation, we’re told, is increasingly uninterested in current affairs. Headlines of “Teenagers have little interest in news” are only a quick Google search away. There are of course the usual theories posited by the media — young adults have short attention spans, we’re bored by everything except celebrity gossip and sports, we’re shallow and distracted by shiny objects or Facebook games — the list goes on and on, with many reasons as to why our demographic is seemingly opposed to discovering any useful information.

I think the explanation is much simpler — we’re not opposed to useful information; it’s just that newspapers contain less and less of it as time goes on. No matter where you look, relevant news stories about current events are frequently overshadowed by the reprinted Twitter insights of celebrities, as if Taylor Swift’s gym socks are just as relevant as the prorogation of Parliament. Actual content is replaced by massive amounts of advertising, gossip, and headlines about soccer moms. No wonder news organizations are voicing concerns about the decline of print media.

This slump in the quality of our news is largely a result of corporate interests trumping real journalism, and a deeply flawed business plan. It’s a scary time to work in news media, as the industry is facing massive layoffs. Canadian newspapers have been attempting to cut down on staff by offering voluntary buyouts, or generously offering to allow their employees to work fewer hours for less money. CanWest, the company that publishes the Edmonton Journal, has been continually trying to “centralize editorial operations,” which is a nice way of saying, “laying off and/or buying out as many staff as we possibly can.”

These layoffs are part of an attempt to allocate more funds to online resources, and to increase profits by competing with YouTube and Wikipedia. The Canadian Association of Journalists, however, points out that the true result of these mass layoffs — more than 2,000 in the past few years — is a drop in the quality of media, both printed and televised. And really, is it worth it? I, for one, don’t need my news sources to resemble YouTube — I’d like them to resemble, say, news.

Readership is falling, not because we’re not interested in the news, but because they’ve more or less stopped printing it. With less income from the sale of papers, newspaper publishers try to keep the advertising dollars coming in, and censor those journalists who might damage profitability by rocking the boat. Journalists who are too controversial are liable to find themselves out of a job. This has obvious implications for investigative journalism, an invaluable source of news that’s often unpopular with the men in suits. The void left by those stories is then filled with a combination of ads and bland fluff pieces that are as inoffensive as possible. It’s not surprising that many Canadian journalists are considering the buyout offers due to plummeting industry standards.

With all the issues of mainstream news media, what’s an information-hungry student to do? Well, if you desperately need to know what Paris Hilton is tweeting about, you can follow her yourself instead of investing in a paper that reports it. Otherwise, you might consider following a few independent journalists — they occasionally do this weird thing where they link to articles that talk about world events in a meaningful way. There are also a number of “reader-supported” independent news sources available online. And, of course, where would you be without the Gateway? … Actually, don’t answer that. My job might hinge on it.