"To Save Themselves, US Newspapers Put Readers to Work"

Unlike the previous article I wrote about "Goodbye to Newspapers?" this article has a wonderful feeling of newspapers putting up a fight to stay in the game. Jeff Howe starts out the article brilliantly with an introduction I will not quickly forget with the image of the running shoes in a box. It was a great start to an article which specifically focused on newspapers adapting and running to catch up with technology and a changing audience. The statistics are all there but they are also very balanced. The first part of the article quotes that "newspaper circulation has declined 30 percent since 1985" but towards the end, the local Cincinnati Enquirer has been able to boast a 44 percent increase in advertisement sales just in the past year. This article was very interesting in the sense that it specifically pointed that while newspapers have the chance to survive, they will have to adapt to holding a slightly different position in society. The shocker in this article was when Linda Parker talks about all the articles she receives from civilians and how she will actually print/post all of them. I feel like this is an injustice to the journalism profession. The fact that they are letting people just put anything into "news" is one of the things that is making the newspaper less appealing. When articles become simple and poorly written, people are not going to go looking towards newspapers as something to read, at that point you may as well read a biased blog by some unknown writer in who knows where. I feel like while society may be pushing to be more involved, they are not willing to do the work that really needs to accompany writing a true journalistic piece of work.