Ellen Hume

Why should we worry about the death of newspapers?

Reading any newspaper is pretty much a two-dimensional, impersonal, top-down, one-way, and often stupefying experience. News reports are infuriatingly self-referential and incomplete. If they stir us up they don’t give us any place to go. Is this civic engagement?  The endless stream of revelations and problems, celebrities and disasters, seems disconnected from our own personal choices and public solutions. Too often, newspaper readers feel like “passengers in the back seat of the car, howling at the driver,” as MIT Prof.

…MIT Prof. William Uricchio observed that old media make us feel like “a passenger in the back seat of the car, howling at the driver.” 

…Phil Balboni debated a skeptical MIT student about news “objectivity” at Balboni’s new online GlobalPost venture.