Newspaper's content
There certainly has been a slight shift in some of the local papers reporting. The changing of reporters within some of these papers leaves me to wonder if all will quickly shift back to business as usual.
Do yourselves a little favor when thinking about the ?“news?” that is available for you to view here about town. Try the following experiment with your kids as a way of helping them with math, while determining just how much news is available.
Step one - get (2) copies of the same issues of any one of the weekly papers available. Usually you get one ?“free?”, ask a neighbor who complains and never reads their issue, ask for one after someone is finished with theirs, or buy one at Krogers.
Step two ?– measure in inches the size of the paper?’s page (left to right & top to bottom).
Step three ?– multiple the measurement by the number of pages in that issue. (for just one of the two copies)
At this point you will have the total # of square inches of this specific publication. Write this number down.
Step four ?– take one of the copies and cut up all the articles, advertisements, pictures, sports related stories, crosswords, etc. from all of the even pages and place these in corresponding piles.
Step five ?– take the other copy of the paper and cut out (as above) for all the odd pages and place them in the same corresponding piles as the even pages.
Step six ?– measure the square inches of each topic pile. (Measure one side only)
Step seven ?– compare how many square inches of ?“news?” articles there are to the other topics.
Conclusion: A newspaper?’s JOB is to sell advertising. No other grouping of your piles of various section of the paper will come close to the square inches of advertising. If any newspaper provides you with ?“news?” whether it be well written and researched or otherwise, they are in business to do their NUMBER ONE JOB of selling advertising. With that focus in mind, knowing that there are numerous ?“public information officials?” here contributing to releases in our town. Which happens to be these peoples?’ NUMBER ONR JOB. So, what are your odds of investigative reporting?
For those of you that have 3rd & 4th grade kids, this is a great little math teacher in two-dimensional geometry. (square inches, volume comparisons ?– it could be expanded to percentages, ratios, graphing types, etc.). So there you have it, whether well written or not, there really is a use for that local newspaper.
With the factual evidence of you own ?“experiment?” in front of you, is it appropriate to believe that a reader will get a true and complete picture of local issues within the papers pages?
