The other day, I watched as Karoline Leavitt, the new White House press secretary, ran her first briefing to a packed room of reporters. She mentioned that henceforth representatives from on-line sites, not just newspapers and TV-news outlets, would be invited to the briefings. She got me to thinking.

Photo courtesy of Arsenik/iStockphoto
Delivery of the news is changing. When I was growing up in the suburbs of St. Louis, my parents read two newspapers, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one delivered in the morning and one at night. (On cold winter days, we kids were often sent outside to pick up the papers.) The Globe Democrat ceased publication in 1986. The Post-Dispatch is still in business.
When I graduated college and worked in Chicago, the town had three newspapers and I worked for one, the Chicago Daily News (the paper ceased publication in 1978). My friend Judy worked at Chicago’s American (it went out of business in 1975). (Our school was not prestigious enough for us to have applied to the big Chicago Tribune. Today only the Tribune survives.)
Judy and I had both studied journalism at Iowa State University. We were taught the “5 Ws” of journalism, the five things every story must include: Who, What, Where, When, and Why. Our stories had no bylines because we were just reporting facts. At the time, there was no “O” for opinion though there were columnists with opinions. I wonder what the journalism schools are teaching now?
Today, newspapers in every city are fast-disappearing. Newspapers can’t report news fast enough when competing with the cable channels. And, it seems, long in-depth articles on current subjects are out of fashion except in some magazines. So, I, too, write for an on-line publication, Living-Las-Vegas.com. I subscribe to the Las Vegas Review Journal on-line (to save running to the curb every morning in my nightie) and I subscribe mostly to read John Katsilometes’ entertainment column every day. Although it is worth remembering that investigative journalism is alive and well at the Review Journal and a number of media outlets in Nevada and elsewhere. And I watch TV.
I remember my father reading the newspaper and every so often putting it down and cautioning us (the kids) not to get into cars with strangers. Then he’d go back to reading the news with commentary for the table or even the best of the funnies (I still read the Review Journal funnies) and then he’d go to the sports page announcing who won what (as if we didn’t know). We were all together then.
Today the kids and even the adults are in different rooms huddled over their phones or watching different TVs.
Looking back to the 1950s, I miss those days.