Causecast

by JESSICA WOLF, Contributing Writer

I confess. I just don’t have the heart to cancel my LA Times subscription.

I also confess. I don’t actually crack open and read the paper product that is so diligently delivered to my door every Thursday through Sunday.

Ever.

(OK since I am in confession mode….I do still skim through the Sunday ads from time to time).

But mostly, yes, that’s right. I open the door, grab my paper and immediately place it in my recycling bin. I pulled out a stack to take the accompanying photo here. At least those carefully constructed pages got a bit of a change of scenery this week!

My LA Times instant-recycling status should not imply that I don’t read news.

I read the heck out of news from a variety of sources every day. If I could cobble together all my online sources of news and create a daily Jessica Wolf Post, today’s edition might include the following:

—The New York Times’ take on the future of the auto industry that accompanies coverage of Chrysler’s impending bankruptcy filing.
—LA Times’ ongoing reporting of the swine flu (with nifty interactive map).
—Former Chicago Tribune editor James Warren’s Huffington Post blog about President Obama’s first 100 days in office.
—Entertainment Weekly’s recap of the American Idol episode I missed (in favor of catching “Lost” in real time).
—Throw in some business news from my favorite trade magazine Advertising Age, a quick check of National Geographic for photo oddities, news of the weird and a pass at Treehugger for a dose of green and there you have it.

Of course, most of this is happening with NPR playing in the background as well.

There’s a real beauty in the inherent personalization of an online news world.

So why does this news junkie still haphazardly cling to the traditional newsprint?

Part of it is solidarity. I was a print journalist for more than a decade. I spent hours dutifully laboring over the inverted pyramid in J-school, I agonized over trying to learn the great art of writing a two-column headline. I obsessed over gutter size, widows, orphans, story placement, photo selection and caption writing. Most of these things are obsolete to the modern online journalist.

While many of those skills listed above will likely go by the wayside in an increasingly print-free news world, the good news is, I think, that the reasons people get into journalism in the first place will largely remain the same, if not become intensified by the increased access to information and broader perspective the advent of the Internet has offered. (I don’t even want to remember how difficult it was to find sources, dig up contact information and research background information in the pre-Internet era.)

The ultimate question is will we as readers and the art of journalism itself suffer in a singularly Web-driven news world?

I think the answer is both yes and no—for a time at least.

The kind of people who are driven to report news have passion, skepticism, a touch of aggression and an often cynically laden desire to change the world by hearing and retelling the stories of people in it. (Of course in my case, you can likely add a latent desire to be Lois Lane and date Superman to that description).

I don’t see those journalistic personality traits changing simply because the medium has and will likely continue to change. I cling to that hope the way I will cling to my LA Times subscription until the bitter end (though I have let go of the Superman fantasy).

On the other hand, every day I read about more newspapers folding, more respected papers cutting staff and it stings, because I have that visceral connection to picking up the day’s newspaper and seeing that amazing photo from a big game or big event of the day before, blown up large above the fold with an exciting headline.

The truth is, we as a culture are evolving away, have already evolved away, from that kind of visceral connection with news.

Our new sensation is with multimedia—videos, interactive maps, the ability to instantly comment on a story—all those accouterments that help tell the stories of the day in a way the print medium never had a chance to compete. A sense of community has always been important, if not vital, to a newspaper’s readership; that community is just far more visible (and quantifiable) on the Web.

Our new sensibility too, is not to read and absorb news about what happened yesterday or even last night, but what happened an hour ago, a minute ago, what’s happening right now. And that is what online news sources offer.

My hope, my dream, is that some vestige of the old-school print product will remain for at least the near future, for at least until everyone is walking around with ubiquitous Kindle-like products or programmable holographic palm implants (what? it could happen!).

Perhaps the newspaper can remain in a form that takes the quick-hit, instant-snack news of the Internet and expands it into a more contextual, more informational, more lovingly written form than the often-distracting Internet can provide.

Or perhaps, we old-school print-lovers-turned-online-writers will learn how to converge the two for the Internet news audience.

One thing’s for sure. My recycling bin will stay full in the meantime.

Image by Jessica Wolf.