When it first appeared, nobody expected Television news to become a threat to the ever-popular daily newspaper. Television news started out as dry and boring – an old man with a cigarette reading the news to you. Kind of like your father sitting at the head of the table and reading the newspaper to the family after dinner. This image of television news changed suddenly, and without warning.

Television news rose so quickly to dominate all the news mediums because it was the most entertaining. The television producers took the most exciting bits of news, simplified it as much as possible, shortened the story into a fifteen to thirty second sound/video byte and vomited it up onto the screen. People liked the easy-to-understand, no-questions-asked format of news. To make things easier for the audience, the pictures the news producer chooses tell the story themselves; so if the viewer were to turn off the sound, they would still understand the story! The removal of words is the ultimate in the “dumbing” down of news – with television, people do not have to use their minds any longer. They were tired of wading through columns and columns of print, with television, they got a clear, sharp, exciting, moving picture. Not only is the picture moving, but it may be happening right now! The lure of instantaneous news is something newspapers cannot compete with. It used to be that the newspaper would release up to five different editions a day to keep updated with the news, now that television is here, people can leave their TVs on all day and watch the updated news as it happens. There is no need to take the story to the press, to print it, to distribute it, this is all done instantly over the airwaves through a dashing news anchor reading from a teleprompter. The people who bring you the news become celebrities. They must be appealing, friendly, attractive, and trust-worthy. The person who recites the news is not the only person who must be a celebrity, but also, the people being reported on. If there is a conflict between two countries they need the two individual leaders to square off against each other. The more conflict and/or drama, the better it is for the television. A good example of this which is happening currently is the “Bush versus Saddam” story being pushed on all networks. Conflict and drama will always be a top story, sensationalism sells. As with CTV news, “If it bleeds, it leads!”

How did newspaper organizations respond to this new brand of news? In the article “The decline of the daily newspaper” by Gillian Steward, the author illustrates what Canada’s biggest newspaper corporation’s response was. Southam Newspapers owned 27 percent of the dailies in the years around 1980. Their next largest competitor was Thomson Newspapers, with 21 percent of the Canadian market. In the next ten years, all the newspaper companies would begin experiencing a sharp decline of interest in their newspapers. They would start losing money, and according to Gillian Steward’s account, they had no idea why. They spent countless dollars on finding out why readers were unsubscribing to their papers, and why they were not attracting new readers. The answers they received were as follows;

Newspapers are boring and stale. Newspapers don’t tell me enough about what I want to know. Newspapers are full of articles about boards and councils and officials and spokesmen, but they have little to do with real people and their problems, their hopes and dreams. I don’t have time to read a newspaper – I’m too busy.
(p. 281, G. Steward, 1996)

The newspapers (Gillian’s at least) responded by accepting these critiques with open arms. They too were tired of reporting on councils and board meetings. The added color, made stories shorter, and easier to digest, and tried to make the paper look a lot slicker. Just as The Province is doing in Vancouver, adding an almost full page picture on the cover, which is usually a video capture from film and not a picture taken with a professional camera.

In essence, newspapers everywhere started to become more like television. Instead of breaking away from television, trying to be different than television to attract an audience, they tried to steal back the audience that television took from them (the newspapers). The readers who now did not read the paper, but instead watched the T.V. for news would somehow be enticed by a newspaper that looked like television news. Many papers, like The Province switched to a tabloid format, and were purposefully aimed at entertaining, not informing. The news paper used to be a source of controversy, it used to be a formula for asking significant questions, and raising relevant issues. In essence, it used to act as a public service for the community, to let them know the truth about how things are happening in the real world. What happened to this need for controversy? If television attracts readers with entertainment, and papers switch their format in hopes to entertain, where will we get our real news? What has happened to social conscience? Papers do not need to be entertaining to be the system of “checks and balances” on our society. All the people who want a paper for those reasons have no where to turn anymore. The T.V. is filled with “junk food journalism” (p 197, A. Osler, 1993), and to compete with television the papers have emulated this “junk food journalism”! In essence the newspapers have abandoned the loyal readers that have actually kept their subscriptions in search of readers who have abandoned the newspaper. Obviously the readers who kept their subscriptions were happy with the way the newspaper was presented and had no wish for change. It cannot be argued that the newspapers were losing too much money either because whenever their readerships went down, it was by (at the most) 13 percent. There is still the other 87 percent of the readership who kept their subscriptions. The newspaper companies did not think of them, they just jumped on the bandwagon of “junk food journalism” to try to regain that 13 percent.

Yet no matter how hard they tried, they could not recover their former subscription numbers. The television and the newspaper are two separate mediums and should be kept that way. The Province should not even be called a “news”paper, they should rename it something more accurate, maybe “Daily Gossip” or “Celebrity Watcher”. In today’s society, newspapers will never again hold the prominence they once did midway through the twentieth century. The common fold of people will always hunger after the quick news byte, seduced by flashy pictures and a smooth voice. If papers want to gain respect and loyalty again, they should be there for the community, like Gillian Steward says so many times in her article. They should report hard-hitting news, issues close to home, perform a public service for the community they are based in, which is something television could never compete with. Television has to be slick, it cannot diverge from accepted societal views. The newspaper has the freedom to do this, everyone has a right to a point of view, and everyone’s point of view should be accessible. Only the newspaper has the ability to make this right easily available.