The news of today will be the stories of the past. Every day, headlines change and papers read differently. Throughout the ages, newspapers and headings have changed in how they come across to the reader. The following are some ways newspapers have altered as times have changed.
The arrangement of newspapers during the 17th and 18th century is drastically different from our modern day paper. They had the date and the title but these older papers seem to present the news in segmented stories, for example, each representing the different views from, say, different cities about a particular subject or event. Which meant everyone who read the paper, no matter where they were from, would be able to see the news from the prospective of others and vice versa. Nearly each state or major city had the opportunity to have its voice heard, something that may not be all too common today. However, there was no headline or no storyline embedded in the paper, which would cause some confusion for the reading not knowing where one story ended and the other began. This all changed towards the middle of the 19th century. Headlines for each story were place and put into a box of their own, separated by a “wire” line making it easier to read. Slowly, over time, even the headlines on the front-page began to change.
Towards the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, headlines began to read more like questions rather than story titles. The reason for this was to entice people to read the whole newspaper, or at least the rest of the story, which started on the front page but continued on, say, page 18. This tactic dramatically increased newspaper sells. It hooked the reader into buying a newspaper in order to figure out if stocks were really crashing or to see what happened to their favorite celebrity. However, newspapers started to slowly decline, which meant more change had to happen.
People were tired of waiting to reading yesterday’s news. They felt as if newspapers were not adequate, or were too slow to give them the news of today. Because of this and competition from broadcast and radio news, some paper companies turned to the growing online web as a means to deliver news as it happened. This strategy is still in use today. In an NPR article, an employee tells how The Washington Post was completely transformed after Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, bought it in 2013. “Its monthly Web traffic has grown 56 percent, to 78.7 million over the past two years, according to ComScore.” As times change, we will see if newspapers will become relics of the past or the way of the future.
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