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How Do You Get the News?

6/1/2006

By Terry Calhoun

Up until very recently, I read five or more newspapers each day. I would stop on the way home after work and purchase the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News, and the New York Times. I would already have the Michigan Daily because there is free distribution of it in the lobby of our building. And the Ann Arbor News is waiting for me by the mailbox when I get home.

Now I'm down to only the Ann Arbor News and the Sunday New York Times. Why is that? Has my reading speed slowed? No. Can I no longer afford to buy so many papers? No. (Although my wife is happy that I don't spend that money.) Am I just too busy in the evenings doing housework? Absolutely not!

Maybe you've guessed by now that "Why is that" is a trick question. Actually, the language of the factual set-up to the question is misleading. Here's how…

I no longer read those newspapers, but I still read (or listen to) the news. I've successfully converted to reading most of my news online. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that having the Sunday New York Times and the daily Ann Arbor News lying around is a positive influence on the rest of my family, most of whom would not read much news at all otherwise, I would convert completely to online reading. (And, as a result, have much cleaner fingers at dinnertime.)

The conversion was slow at first. It began ten years ago when I became the editor of SCUP Email News, one of the very oldest, continuously-published e-mail newsletters on any topic. (It’s been around since 1987 – planners really do think ahead!) It was originally called SCUP Bitnet News. I’m only aware of one older newsletter within higher education, the monthly Electronic AIR, which predates SCUP Email News by a few weeks. I don't know of anything older outside of higher education.

One of my tasks is finding, describing, and linking to a number of higher education planning-related news items or resources. The SCUP Links portion of SCUP Email News tends more toward substantial resources, magazine, or journal articles than to newspaper-type articles. But in my monthly, then weekly search, I began to notice how much news was becoming available online from sources not often found in newspaper racks in southeastern Michigan. For example, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and so forth. Those weren't replacing my newspaper reading, they were adding to it.



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