Update on Junior Theme

Over the weekend I emailed a possible interviewee, Pablo Boczkowski, a professor in the department of communication studies at Northwestern. He hasn't responded yet so I will try to send him another email in a day or so and in the meantime I am emailing a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the authors of my book. I do have a thesis, but it is definitely not as clear as it should be. The main idea of my thesis is that the corporate takeover of small newspaper businesses has caused the decline in profits and readership in the newspaper industry. However, I haven't found a clear/concise way to say that. Its also been slightly difficult to find sources that specifically talk about this idea, as most discuss the way the internet plays a roll in the declining newspaper industry. So overall I have certainly made some progress but I am looking to make some leaps this week in actually writing parts of my paper.

Good luck to everyone on their papers!

Beginning Junior Theme... AH!

After jumping around from different topics, yesterday I came to a final decision about what I am going to write about for Junior Theme. At first I was thinking about researching how students are becoming more and more success-driven instead of being learning-driven. But after I thought about it for a while I lost interest in that topic. One of my initial thoughts was to write about something concerning communication in America and how Americans think in certain ways. Then I thought about the newspaper industry and how nowadays many newspaper companies are shutting down. The change in the way America wants to obtain the news is very interesting to me. So my tentative why question is:

Why is the newspaper industry in decline?

The use of online newspapers and the Internet seems like a logical answer, but I want to go deeper and find out why this change of thought occurred. Mr. Bolos also suggested that I look at how the decline in reading newspapers might be over-exaggerated as well. I found a very recent book called The Death and Life of American Journalism at the Wilmette Public Library that I think will be informative and helpful, in addition to the website/radio shows from On the Media.

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