One of the great benefits of working at High Point University is the availability of free newspapers all over campus. Whether it's the NY Times or The Wall Street Journal available at the library or USA Today and the News & Record at the Slane Center, one could spend all day cruising around campus with your head buried in some interesting story or sports box score. But why don't I see students reading them?
I guess I've finally come to the same conclusion as the stock market: newspapers are just not part of the younger generation's lifestyle. Maybe it's the ink they leave on your hands or the awkwardness involved in flipping pages or that they give us more information than we want to know, I think any reasonable observer will recognize that the future of newspapers as we know them is dim.
That said, college educators need to prepare our "print" journalists to work in a new domain. It used to be that the prime job for college journalism graduates was at a daily newspaper. Not any more. This is something we have to take into account as we develop the new curriculum for the Nido Qubein School of Communication.
