There has been a lot of talk about the dying of paper press in the past few years. And many papers have seen their ultimate demise after the internet has brought the news for free and in non-physical form to the consumers. New York Times, on the other hand, has received a lot of digital subscribers and thus, it seems to be doing well in this transformation time period.

Samantha Bee did a nice, yet short, piece on her show, “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee”, about the topic. In it, Bee said that the customers want to receive the news and read well done articles, but don’t want to pay for them. This is something that in my opinion is an excellent point: people want a lot, but want to get it for pennies – or totally free. This has nothing to do with the media houses or the greed of advertisers. This is the fault of us, the consumers!

If we want to keep journalism alive and, most importantly, safe and unbiased, we should be giving our support for the profession. There are multiple examples of issues like Watergate, that only came to light, because of journalists. Yet, we consumers, seem to accept that the journalism done by professionals is dying and bloggers and vloggers taking over their part on bringing information and news.

This is where this issue gets even more serious: the people and institutes coming to replace the older and famous news sources. The space will be gladly taken over by extremists from left and right to skew the information in order to favor their point of view. I don’t understand why we consumers let this happen. Why are we giving in to the idea that the “real” news is given from some blog or some podcaster, without the hard work of going through the sources, fact checking and putting themselves on the line.

Like I’ve said before: the people who say they don’t trust the mainstream news, can never say where they get their news sources from. It’s always a gut feeling or something they see in the neighborhood or hearsay from friends and relatives or social media.

To correct the situation, I would recommend people to subscribe to e-papers or at least taking off the ad-blockers from the news websites.