Education or Self-Absorption

A recent poll for the Civitas Institute shows less than half the voters in North Carolina know which political party is in charge of the state legislature.

I would argue that this is not a result of a lack of education, but rather a result of our self-absorption.  

In school, I was forced to memorize the state counties, their seats and other facts about North Carolina government, but I never saw this as something that effected me and thus I did not attempt to retain this information.

So perhaps the problem does not lie within the education system, but rather how the information is presented to our students. They aren't taught the importance of local and state government. They simply learn the facts to pass the exams.

The solution is not to fill the minds of young people with facts, but with the desire to learn about these institutions. But how can we do this? I do not know, but I hope the media is able to engage young readers and instill in them a sense of political efficacy.

Is there still "news" in newspaper?

It is often said that if newspapers disappear, citizens will get less local, state and political news. For two weeks, my Citizens and Media course at UNC-CH conducted a content analysis of six North Carolina newspapers and we found that of over 5,200 stories, only 22 percent was political news.

Further, only about 6 percent was local political news, 5 percent state political news and about 11 percent national political news.  In comparison, 27 percent was sports.

I find it interesting that the number of national political news stories was nearly equal to state and local political news combined.  For years people have expressed more interest in national politics than state and local, and it seems this is being mirrored by the media -- even these six local newspapers.

But what does the lack of political news say about newspapers? Are they printing more sports and entertainment stories because that is what people want to read, or is there another underlying cause? Are people getting political news from other sources or are they simply not interested?

In North Carolina, several communities have blogs solely devoted to local news, like Chapel Hill Watch. So perhaps citizens would get more political news if they rely on new rather than traditional media.

Cheaper by the PDF

Recently I talked with several editors of a Greensboro newspaper.  The first told me that the paper would soon begin charging for content. She seemed a little skeptical of this development, but referred me to the Editor-In-Chief.

He explained that the site would being using a service to post PDFs of their paper online. As a news designer, I was overjoyed.

He told me that they were doing so to make their "Newspapers in Education" program more affordable. Classrooms can flip through the papers electronically, saving the newspaper a neat sum in printing costs.

But the paper plans to charge a subscription rate for this service. 

Will people pay to get their news online if it still looks like a newspaper? Or will they defer to the traditional Web content?

I'm eager to hear how this project turns out. My hope is that people will subscribe to the electronic editions of print media, but I fear this is unlikely.