EOTO 2 presentations

  Out of all of the groups that presented, I enjoyed group 4’s presentations the most. But the topic I liked the best was about “news deserts”. So before I heard the presentation I already knew the definition of a news desert; Quick definition for those who don’t know: Places that have vacancies in news. But I didn’t care very much or thought that it was much of a concern until I learned about the alarming statistics. There are more than 1,300 U.S cities that don’t have access to the proper news whether that be through a newspaper or a local station; and this only gets worse for poorer communities. But the numbers somehow find a way to get even worse, of the 3,143 counties in the U.S more than 2,000 have no working newspapers.

I also learned another surprising fact which is that American cities are losing at least 2 newspapers per week. And while I thought that the number would be higher, two is still too many and with the decrease of newspapers jobs in this field have dwindled significantly. It's estimated that over 40,000 journalists have been laid off or have received pay cuts because of the increase of online journalism. And the journalists and writers that are lucky to still have a job have made the transition to online news sites and digital magazines.

But I’m glad to know that there have been efforts to protect local news through the knight foundation. I think this was the true highlight of the news desert presentation as most of the presentations stated an issue that didn’t have a solution to the problem but this one did. The knight foundation has raised over 7 million dollars to help fund local news stations and papers which in turn has brought some jobs in and has helped create local news stations in small cities that otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do so on their own.

(All of my information came directly from the speaker and their slides on our EOTO2 presentation day)