Newspapers have had a glorious history. From Gutenberg’s movable type, which lead to the printing press, to the uncovering of the Watergate burglary that led to resignation of President Nixon, and from Benjamin Day’s penny newspaper, The Sun, to digital media, newspapers have played an important role in how we think.

Some people say that newspapers are dinosaurs. How many people actually read newspapers? People watch the news on TV and they read it on their computers and smartphones, but the days of newspapers are dwindling. Circulation is decreasing. Newspapers like USA Today, with it’s TV like presentation of news, have become among the highest circulating newspapers today. But even USA Today is increasingly moving to an online format. My family still subscribes to a newspaper, but when it didn’t arrive one Sunday morning my father went to the local store to purchase a newspaper and found out they no longer sold newspapers and the nearest store that sold them was ten blocks away.

We learned in our readings that newspapers have existed since Roman times, but the modern newspaper exists primarily from Gutenberg press German papers printed in the 1600s. But it was Benjamin Day who brought newspapers to the masses by having them cost only a penny so that more citizens could afford a newspaper. This is when media became mass media.

The 1800’s welcomed newspaper men like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. To compete with one another the two used sensationalism and crime, sex, and scandal became the news of the day. Yellow Journalism as it was called, printed misleading stories exaggeration and misinformation. Today, this would be called fake news.

During this era, cartoon newspapers, such as The Yellow Kid were prominent since they were easier for Immigrants to read and understand. Other types of Journalisms evolved such as literary which combined research and reporting with the writing style of fiction. We see this type of work today in publications such as the New Yorker and written by prominent writers such as Tom Wolfe, and Truman Capote. Other styles such as advocacy journalism, consensus journalism, and conflict journalism also evolved which lead to niche newspapers. Today, this is been further dissected with the advent of blogs and extremely narrowly focused online publications.

Within newspapers there evolved columns or sections of the newspaper that focused on issues that were either ignored or not fully investigated. The film Spotlight focuses on the Spotlight team at the former Hearst newspaper, The Boston Globe and there investigation of sexual abuse by the Boston’s Catholic priests. The team spent eight months digging into the roll of the Boston archdiocese in covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests. It is a chilling study of the way power operates in the absence of accountability. The movie is a gripping detective story of group of journalist who gradually uncovered the crimes by 249 priest and brothers. Rather than stop at one or two they saw a house of cards which could not be written about until all the cards have fallen.

It is movies like this that underscore the the importance of newspaper. Papers like The Globe take the time to do the research to uncover the facts that lead to change. We see this in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and other newspapers. They write stories that can and often do change the world.

So, are newspapers an artifact of the 20th century? Probably the paper is an artifact since printing is expensive, but the style and approach that newspapers and news magazines take will be with us for centuries to come — it will just be online.