Fully 100 percent of the davidcmorrison.blogspot.com staff is tired of reading numbers on a computer screen

The Pew Research Center’s study quantified the very things teachers and articles have been telling me for a while: newspaper readership is declining rapidly, more people are relying on the internet for news and young people don’t care about news nearly as much as old people do (but we’re getting better…or the old people are getting worse).

And we like to play video games.

But wading through this sea of figures, I found three trends that encouraged me and reinforced my desire to become a newspaper journalist.

First is the finding that people are using the internet as a supplementary source rather than the only source. This seems to fly in the face of all the media commentators who are sounding the death knell of newspaper journalism (*cough* Dan Gillmor *cough*). This is only the case in the present and could change in future eras of flying cars and robots who can love, but for now, I’m claiming victory, Pyrrhic though it may be.

Second is the fact that newspapers are still the place people rely on mostly for local news. I think it’s important, in this age of the expanding scope and commoditization of news outlets, that readers can still have something to fall back on with a specific focus on the community. It might not be huge news that Bithlo, Fla., is getting a new town hall, but the people of Bithlo deserve to know it and deserve to have it treated with the gravity of any other story. And I’m glad to see people realize newspapers are still the best places to find this.

Lastly, people find reading the paper relaxing. When you sit down with a newspaper, you don’t have to deal with commercials, like you would on TV or the radio, or with flashing ads and banners trying to give you seizures, like on the internet. The thing that has always attracted me to newspaper journalism is the realization that readers are reading my stories because they want to and because they have the time to fully digest it. I don’t want them to be trolling the internet and “bump into” my stories, because then I’m being shoved into the five-second spot before the microwave rings and their Hot Pockets are ready.

The slow-paced feel that goes along with newspaper readership also gives room for more creativity and in-depth reporting, and the study also found that a good number the people who still read newspapers do so for this aspect. When the emphasis is placed on getting the news and getting it fast, it detracts from the creative process, the “writing” of “news writing.” If the emphasis is placed on speed rather than style, will there be room in the industry anymore for writers like Tom Wolfe, who turned their pieces into short novels? Or will the stories of the future all read like press releases? It’s comforting to know readers still appreciate newspaper reporting for the depth it can bring to a story.