You’ll miss us when we’re gone

The American public has always had a love-hate relationship with the media. At IU, the student newspaper has been referred to for decades as the Indiana Daily Stupid. You can make fun of us all you want, but we know there would be a gaping void in your life if we weren’t there to provide that daily crossword puzzle during your economics lecture.\nIt’s a tough time for the print news industry. Last week, the New York Times announced it will be eliminating 100 of its 1,330 newsroom jobs this year. The Washington Post is trying to scale back its 785-person staff by offering early retirement packages. What’s worse is that this is the third time the paper has done so since 2003. The L.A. Times is also scrambling to stay successful. It recently hired its fourth editor in only three years, and is planning on reducing the staff by 100 to 150.\nYou’ll be relieved to know that things are going just fine here at the IDS, and we’re not going anywhere (although some of you might wish that a few opinion columnists would accept “early retirement”). But the changing trends nationally in technology and consumer demand are causing us to pursue a variety of multimedia options.\nYou might say that desperate times call for “disparate” measures. \nIt’s no big secret that more and more people are spending lots of time online. With the prevalence of Web sites and blogs on every topic imaginable, traditional media outlets have much more competition than they’ve ever had before. We think this is healthy, and we’re excited about it. We know that increased competition will force the media to stay closely tuned to consumer demand.\nEven if print newspapers go the way of the telegram, there will always be a place for media professionals. Consider the recent writer’s strike. Going a few months without new television shows didn’t cause the meltdown of American society, as was widely anticipated. Many people just went online to be entertained. On the other hand, now that the strike is over, people are eager to get “LOST” in television shows again. The Internet offers a nice change of pace, but at the end of the day, people still want the quality shows that are produced by people whose profession it is to make them. The middle-aged guys blogging from their moms’ basements might be able to provide enough of an alternative to keep the mainstream media on its toes, but they’ll never have the resources, training and professionalism of traditional media companies.\nSo at the risk of sounding shameless, we encourage you to go poke around at www.idsnews.com, and let us know what you think. Almost everything we offer has comments enabled so you can be as mean as you want when telling us how we’re not doing our jobs right. We’ve been working hard this semester to improve our online content. It’s pretty new for most of us, but we really want to be on the cutting edge of providing the types of content that our readers want.