Before there is social media, there are already newspapers. Before we become netizens, we are readers.

As a journalism student, I have always been challenged as to why I chose this course—to waste my four years studying a profession that is about to end, as others would often say.

With the boom of social media, many believe that the print industry is about to face its doom. The print industry may be waning its limelight, yet it surely will not be threatened. It will continue to live the legacy it beholds.

We must remember that before everything else—before the radio, television, the social media was born—the print industry was already giving us available information. Before the Janet Napoles scheme appeared on our TV screens and heard it on air, we first read it on a broadsheet. Before the rage of hundred thousands of netizens, the ten-billion peso pork scam had been first published in the Inquirer. Prior to the so-called million people march on Luneta against pork misuse, the controversial issue was once written on print.

As for the TV, while it has any right to deliver the people the significant information they need, it tends to feed its viewers tidbits of gossip primarily-based on commercial interest. With the ongoing investigation of pork barrel scam still contained in the newspapers’ reports, the most powerful medium in the traditional tri-media seems to have somewhat diverted away to the onset of the current faction Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF)’s siege in Zamboanga. While the latter can be weighed as important as the former, it looks like media blackout has come along the way.

Almost the same goes with its radio counterpart. Talking about being handy, compact-made transistor radios can catch up as an alternative to the hassles of much bigger broadsheets. But strictly speaking of signal-dependence and quality-wise, the fast flow of reportage in a radio can never beat the well-presented facts in a newspaper.

We can always freely blabber our ideas on a certain issue in social media but when it comes to its in-depth analysis, admit it, there are some of us who would still go on to reading newspapers. And with the advancements in the today’s technology, the print media has paved its way online, thus, providing the citizens easier access to information. Instead of saying that the print is on the verge of extinction, rather we can imply that it is evolving.

Definitely, the print industry will not die.


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