The main source I use for my news is www.msn.com. I always go there when I need to find out what is going on around the world. I don’t bother to read USA Today or any other newspaper because it’s just unnecessary. “Why waste paper?” I always think to myself.
Not too long ago, I watched a video where Jack Utko talked about newspapers and how they are dying out. People no longer want to pay for day old news and advertisers don’t want to either. Also, people have become more environmentally conscious and no longer want to print things on paper when they can just open a computer and get the news that they want from there.
While Jack Utko makes a good argument that making the newspaper more visually pleasing would sell more copies, I believe that we are heading in a direction away from paper all together. The future has a lot in store and in the way of news and advertising, we are making advances in technology rather quickly. I know that when I turn on my iTouch for example and head to Safari, I get ads right away for various products I have never heard of. I just exit them of course, but they are still advertising in my iTouch. Other applications have ads on there too. Not only that, but when you watch a music video on youtube, they try to sell you the song that is playing by popping up an ad for that on there as well. Advertisements are everywhere! Billboards, tv, internet, etc. Wherever you go, there are ads for something! Getting rid of newspapers all together would save trees and I believe help our industry because people could then learn how to type all the information into say “Word” and have it posted to online web sites that people could have access to. The big question would be “how do these sites make money?” And that would be something that would need to be figured out. Whether by a fee you would pay to read the information or by advertisers paying to have their ads all over the place, there is always something that can be done to fund a site like that.
Imagine what the future has in store for advertisements and news. Here is a link to a clip from the film “Minority Report” starring Tom Cruise. It takes place about twenty or thirty years in the future. I have a feeling that this is what we are looking at in the way of advertising changing as well as newspapers. In the very end, notice how the people are reading USA Today and it has moving pictures. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5u3axLhMqE
And here is the Jack Utko link: http://www.ted.com/talks/jacek_utko_asks_can_design_save_the_newspaper.html
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