Sunday, February 21, 2016

Wk 7: Who is using and paying for what?



As I understand it, the ramen noodles theory suggests that online news is an “inferior good” which means that online news can coexist with print newspaper, but print is still considered better. Studies show that most people still prefer to get their news from physical newspapers and that’s also where most advertising money is spent. (I felt like I needed to clarify this because it's counterintuitive to me. I do not think print is better.)

I was surprised by this article, because I’ve definitely grown up hearing the “print newspapers are dying” narrative. I think it’s really interesting to find that print newspapers might actually only be failing because of a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of managers. Despite my surprise, this finding reminds me of Dr. Lee’s research study that we read two weeks ago about how journalists are pushed to use social media. These articles combined show that there’s a real lack of understanding about what readers want and/or need, which is troubling.


I’m a little scared how perfectly this describes the situation I’ve found myself with reading. I do a lot of reading. I skim the web and social media, I read for pleasure more than the average person, and as a student I’m often reading more challenging texts. I’ve found that my tendency is to keep moving, even if I’m barely processing what I’ve read. I’m often forced, with great annoyance, to go back and reread.

When the article talked about how one man was having trouble “reading long sentences with multiple, winding clauses full of background information” I was reminded of a book review I wrote for The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan in which I complained about the difficulty I had reading it quickly!

I realize after reading this article that I do engage in my own “slow reading” process when I read for pleasure. I realize now that I have to. If I’m reading something I really want to read, I know to carve out a chunk of time to do it, even if it’s not of difficult reading level. And when I’m reading something more academic and challenging, I make myself read it aloud because it slows me down and I have to pay attention to getting each word.


I really appreciate how open-minded this article is about how millennials receive their news. At first, I thought it was going to be a negative article and I was already preparing myself to feel offended. But when it gets to the part about how “news and information are woven into an often continuous but mindful way that Millennials connect to the world generally, which mixes news with social connection, problem solving, social action, and entertainment,” I was floored. I’d never thought about it that way. But it strangely rang true.


As a student accumulating debt, I am in no position to pay for my news. I don’t think I would pay even if I had money, though, when it’s free so many places. But this article helped me come to an epiphany when it comes to why people might be mor likely to pay for print newspapers than digital. I think it’s because when you’re spending money, it feels like it’s better spent on the tangible, things you can hold in your hand, and refer to whenever you want.

I do not like to pay for music streaming because when you pay, it’s for access and not ownership of the music to play whenever you choose, even if you aren’t online. I don’t know if paying for digital news allows you to download editions or not, but if it doesn’t then I think that’s enough reason to buy physical copies instead.

I’m not sure presumed elevated quality of print has anything to do with it. At least not for me.


I thought this article was a little off. The sentence that claims students “are not as noble in their reading habits when they need beer money” misses the point, and is rude. Textbooks are expensive, it’s why people prefer to buy them second-hand. Textbooks are rarely cheaper in their digital format than they are in print, especially second-hand print. AND few people have need or desire to keep their textbooks past the semester of the class for which they bought them. There’s plenty of reasons to pirate textbooks. I bet publishers have been major pushers for tablets, because they have the most to gain from students using them.

“Examining third-person perception of the news consumers’ intention to pay”

I found this article most interesting regarding how it tries to deal with why people are less likely to pay for news even as the use of digital devices to access news has increased. I feel like the article on the ramen noodle theory was lacking, and this article picked up where it left off, even though it didn’t reference the study (as far as I saw). I’m still not sure the replacing of “information scarcity with information surplus” is responsible for people’s unwillingness to pay for news.

I think an interesting follow up to this study would be to ask people how many peers they know that pay for their news. Because I feel like more people would be less willing to pay for something that most people are getting for free, regardless of quality.

I think I do agree that the bigger problem for newspapers is that people don’t place a lot of value on receiving "higher quality” news. Just as most people are perfectly fine quoting Wikipedia, most people don’t care where they get their news. I think the most important factor of news is whether or not it is true, not where it came from.


Although we have been reading about how the Internet and social media has changed the field of journalism, this is the first article that has given me some perspective and taught me a little about some of the big name legacy newspapers that I’ve seen but not known much about. For instance, I had no idea MSNBC was considered the liberal version of Fox News, and it was the only source of news I would occasionally read as a child because it was the homepage on the family computer I used. Also, I’ve noticed a lot of our articles we read for this class has come from the Washington Post and I had no idea it was such a major newspaper “back in the day.”

I really appreciated how this article combined everything we’ve been reading about into a very readable text format uncluttered by distracting ads. I also like how it makes a bigger argument for the democratic need for good news sources using past historical context. It made me think about caring more about the evolution that’s resulted in today’s news.  

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