It’s a question I often ask myself.
Each week, members of The Grizzly staff distribute our papers to different academic buildings. And each week, I see the papers I distributed the week prior lie there, in the same spot, defeated. So, I collect the old papers, send them to their inevitable recycling bin deaths, and replace them with the new papers—just to pity them all over again the next week.
Some of us might flip through the newspaper strewn about on a random desk when we are avoiding doing work of our own, but I am doubtful there are any super fans who read the newspaper front to back and eagerly await the next issue. Even those of us who do routinely read The Grizzly usually look for the most interesting headlines, skim over the boring passages, and then set the paper back. It is just news; it can hardly be considered a sacred object when we can count on a new issue taking its place as we count on the sun to rise. However, what is sacred about the news is that, like the sun, its ritual is as reliable as nature herself.
So yes, while news is replaceable and even predictable at times, that may be its value. It is a ritual worth keeping alive. Even if our newspapers simply sit on desks untouched, it’s their very presence that serves as a quiet reminder that people are out there observing, writing, and sharing about their world. The paper is symbolic of the many journalists who find a personal calling in getting others to care about what is going on in the world. As I was discussing this article with a peer, he accurately noted that, “many working in journalism aren’t even journalists at all and instead act as marketers.”
Even top news sources like The New York Times use their platform to get people to read their content—providing the option to listen to their articles, having an app that gives you the ability to read just headlines and not the stories and, of course, developing games to get more people to download their app in the first place. If getting others to care about the world is already a complicated task, getting others to care about the going-ons of the Ursinus College campus might as well be impossible.
I am not saying that we should all be reading the school’s newspaper front to back, nor that we need to read the news every morning to be engaged with the world around us. In fact, I’d be a hypocrite if I made such an argument; I routinely skip over the sports section in The Grizzly and refuse to read any of The New York Times articles about stocks. You can spend your time in better ways than reading what you find utterly uninteresting.
But if there is any news story about administrative changes on campus, or if the NYT writes about AI, I am certainly sitting back to read along. Because I am interested and informed about some matters, while indifferent to others, does not mean I am failing to be engaged. It means I am engaging with the news in a way that is meaningful, at least for me. You don’t need to know snippets of everything that is going on–you just need to find issues that you genuinely care to know more about.
Therefore, my question lies not in whether you ought to read the news, but in whether the journalists ought to go on observing and writing if nearly nobody is reading along with them. If many of us either get our news from YikYak, word on the street, or the constant flow of content online, then what purpose does The Grizzly serve? Are we merely wasting paper? Am I wasting paper right now?
In the end, it might not matter how many people are reading the paper. Although the idea of a newspaper is to circulate news, to educate about the inner workings of administrations, and to empower people through the sharing of information, if people are not interested in knowing about the world, or the campus, it is not the job of journalists to make them care. An article in the newspaper should not be a commodity. The number of readers does not equate to the value of a given article. It does not need to be flashy or convincing to be real and true. Sometimes, what is going on in the world is not exciting or controversial. A lot of the time, it is mundane and minor. What makes an article worth reading is not that it is hot news, but that the person who wrote it genuinely cared enough to put what they witnessed into words and share it. To share it with you, the reader, if you are there.