[SOUND] Frankie, dogs have a somewhat unusual relationship to newspapers. sometimes people actually use them to housebreak a dog. we never did that with you, so fortunately you still have an appreciation for what a newspaper is really intended for. The problem is that for those of us who like to read newspapers, they seem to be in the process of going away. So, why are newspapers important? We want to go back to the days of, of the founders of the country, and particularly to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was very concerned about the need for an educated electorate. If you're going to have a democratic government and people vote for their representatives, then those voting had to be knowledgeable. And that meant that they had to be literate. So, you had to be able to read, and that you also had to be able to think about the issues and be made aware of them. So, somehow you had to get news. You had to get, the popular term today would call it, content. And so, Jefferson was a very strong believer in education and in fact, he founded the University of Virginia and thought of that as one of his great achievements. So, he saw education as something he called the equalizer for all children, to give citizens the information they need to transact their business, to understand the duties to his country and to discharge his responsibilities. I think all of the founders of this country were a little worried about democracy. They were in favor of the idea of it, but nobody really knew whether it was going to work or not. They feared that a demagogue could sway the behavior of the mass of voters if they weren't well-educated, if they didn't understand the issues of the day. And since even before the time of the constitution and the revolutionary war, the source, the primary source of content, of information for people in this country for voters has been newspapers. So what's their role? Well, the first one we just talked about, is to provide citizens with the important news of the day. And this one, I think, is really key and it's, it's one that's this kind of going away. There's one website that, that is a, a publication that, that, that does investigative journalism but for the most part, all of the investigations that go on have come from newspapers. If you remember or have ever heard about Watergate, which forced President Nixon eventually from office in 1974, the Watergate scandal was not uncovered by the FBI or the Secret Service or the Washington D.C. police. It was uncovered by The Washington Post, by reporters for The Washington Post. So, investigative journalism goes on today. we happen to read a newspaper called The New York Times. And it always has articles calling attention to something in the country that might need to, to be examined more carefully by people, by policy makers and so on. And that might, in fact, call for some action. Newspapers also offer hopefully informed editorial opinion. yeah, in politics, there is an incredible amount of, of [LAUGH] charges that are traded back and forth and people often say that a particular news source is biased. That is, it favors one party or one candidate. And we see that there are websites that are clearly biased. There are television stations that, that or, or network that support one type of candidate, conservative or liberal, over another. In general even though newspapers are not totally unbiased, they're thought to be one of the least biased sources of news. So, you know, I read the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, their news stories [SOUND] often convey the same information and, and news is the facts. News is what happened. Okay? Now, in terms of analysis and editorials that they write, these two newspapers couldn't be more different. So, if you read an editorial in the New York Times or you read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on the same topic, we'll have two diametrically opposed positions. But if you read the news stories in the two papers, they're much more similar than the editorial pages. And that's what we mean by providing or trying to provide unbiased news. So then, what's happening to newspapers? Well, unfortunately, newspapers in this country are not doing very well. There's actually a website, which you can visit if you want to, called NewspaperDeathWatch.com and it lists the major metropolitan dailies that have closed since March of 2007. And you can go down this list of papers. there's actually quite a lot of news about the Rocky Mountain News, which is an old paper, well-respected in, in Colorado. and, and so on. These, these papers are now gone. If you want a more complete list, [LAUGH] this is a list by state, by newspaper from Wikipedia and it has links to the newspapers that is has short articles about are posted on Wikipedia not all of them are there but many of them are. We've been conducting some research on newspapers and, and what's happened to them in the United States. these are data on the circulation of the top 30, the largest 30 newspapers that have been in business since 1985. And you can see what's happened here. How the circulation has taken a dramatic drop since 1995, and, and, well actually it went up a little bit here in 1997, but then it came down. And what did we say happened in 1995? Well, it may be a coincidence, but I don't think so. I think it was the fact that the internet became available for profit making use and we started going into this period of, of people flocking to the internet to provide content and to get their content. So, we had a little increase and then the bottom began to fall out. Why don't we stop now? And let's ask you a few questions about what you think has been going on in the newspaper industry. So, in summary, in the US, and I think in much of the world, newspapers play an important role in society. But since 1995, it's very clear from the evidence that newspapers have been going out of business at an alarming rate. And so, our question is, what's happening? And the answer is stay tuned, as we talk about this in a couple of other videos this week.
