Tuesday, June 7, 2022

News Papers Are Best for News

 

Many of us have lost the habit of reading daily newspapers due to many reasons. One major reason is the convenience of ‘news apps’ and portals. If you use Android phone or Edge browser, it shows latest news at the bottom of the page. We are able to scroll through the news and get updated. Plus, if you use any social media platform, it is impossible to remain disconnected with latest major news whether in our country or globally. But, this has a pitfall.

The other day, while scrolling through news headlines on my mobile browser, I came across a news where a man had killed someone from his family. I tried to avoid going into details, but the second time the same news was shown, I opened the details and found that some laborer (manual worker) had killed someone from his family. Now, is that really the kind of “news” I would bother to read? In a typical newspaper, such news get featured on internal pages, like page# 4-5. National news appear on front page for a reason. If we have less time, we can also only read the first and last pages, in order to do catch up with major news. We normally do not bother to read localized crime news. But “internet news” often shows us such news without discrimination.

I know that we have options to choose what kind of news we want to read first, but if we open our browser many times a day, it is likely that the priority news would get exhausted and hence the service provider would start showing us such mundane localized crime news.

Newspapers provide more advantages other than arranging news as per priority and relevance which I told about. Newspapers are typically published after midnight and hence they have advantage of being able to do quality reporting based on the findings gathered all through the day. Internet news, on the other hand, often show us in a “developing piece” mode, where editors keep adding to the piece all through the day, starting with almost only a headline. Internet news also breaks a news into 10 different articles, in order to engage users more, which the newspapers would not do in their publication.

Reading newspapers has one more advantage that we can get through all the “important news” in those 30 minutes of time we are reading it and within those many pages. A good newspaper will never leave any important development through the previous day and hence can be relied upon, unlike internet news which cannot be relied since it is almost unmanageable to cover in a set of time.   

Therefore, from all angles, reading newspapers is much better idea as compared to reading internet news. But, reading hardcopies of newspapers results in trees being cut for making paper and hence this is one evil side of it. This can however be overcome if we read daily newspapers “electronically”. I am talking about “e-paper”.

Therefore, I think the best thing to do is to read “e-paper” daily. This will save our time, let us have a disciplined routine, avoid us from toxicity of random internet news, and even be environment friendly. I have started reading an e-paper daily and hope to continue it as a habit.

What do you think?

- Rahul

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