100 Posts!

This post marks my 100th on this blog. I hope the blog has gotten better over time and is making a more consistent, relevant impression on its readership!

I wanted to be sure to touch on an important subject in this post; journalism. Here is an excerpt from an article in Harper's Magazine (November 2009) that discusses the death of the newspaper:

"We will end up with one and a half cities in America - Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between "conservatives" and "liberals." We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of a salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is 'not really a good piece of fiction' - Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald K. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill. - two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry."

Should any of this concern us? In my opinion, no (as long as journalism is living in other media besides newspapers, such as the Internet). Newspapers, as nostalgic as they are, often contain irrelevant information that was only the latest news an hour ago. I do not agree with the notion we are losing structures of intellectual property. We actually have the most intellectual property available for perusal than at any point in history on the Internet. I promise I can find information on newlyweds and legitimate reviews of Moby Dick there.

The death of the newspaper means two things for us, neither of which are really changes. The first is that the average person will still be presented with news that impacts the majority of people from major media outlets, such as MSNBC and FOX. Secondly, more people will be encouraged to get their written news from the Internet. And just like reading a newspaper, if I peruse further into the information available to me on the Internet I can find more personalized news, such as obituaries and book reviews. In essence, nothing has changed besides more information. When I peruse for news on the Internet (or even television), I am not limited to three pages of information presented for today, but rather a vast multitude of limitless information that can be personalized by me to meet my own interests. Sounds like an improvement to me.

Here is to making the next 100 blogs even better than the first!

Until we meet again, goodbye!