When you read a newspaper you can go from page to page, section to section, front to back and back to front. You can put the paper down for a while and come back to it at the same page or start all over again. You are far more likely to read a complete story in the newspaper than when you go online.
When you’re on the Internet, different articles pop up, sometimes with a sea of other story referrals and references that tempt you to constantly hop over to something else.
A newspaper carries current events or in some cases, news about an industry, like REM does with the real estate industry. It’s all in the pages right in front of you. All the news is covered as in-depth as possible, columns of opinion are presented and smaller but honest and useful information bits are available throughout the paper. It’s all here and it’s all complete. There is proper grammar and rarely do you read profanity.
When you read a newspaper, you can have coffee without the worry of spilling it on a keyboard. You can leave it and come back anytime and continue with the same piece without trying to remember what site you were on, what password or what portal you have to enter in the first place. You can carry it into a coffee shop for breakfast, instead of carrying a laptop around in one of those “man bags” while looking for a restaurant that has Wi-Fi and a wall plug for your computer.
I fear that news and stories on line are generally lifeless. The nuances of a story that are important to the spirit and even the point of the story itself are left out or just plain lost. Just like the facts. I fear that less and less people today know what is really going on in the world and in their neighbourhoods because they are not factually informed online.
We live with change. I am not suggesting that Internet technology is not useful because it can be. If you follow baseball you can look up the score of the baseball game last night. If you follow properties for sale currently by Realtors you can do so efficiently online at Realtor.ca. For now.
However, if you want to do some reading on the game of baseball, about the history and the romance of the game, you can only get that from a well-researched newspaper series. If you want to know the aspects of owning real estate, selling or buying a home and working with a Realtor, you need to read some good newspaper or magazine articles on the subject.
Newspaper articles have better information than Internet stories and they have far greater integrity than pop-up pieces on the computer. I am at the point now that I am suspicious of just about everything I see online. There is simply no way to check the honesty and integrity of Internet news. Who are the authors? Where did their facts come from? How accurate are the claims they make? It strikes me that even the grocery store tabloids, who admit to sensationalist journalism, seem to have more accuracy in their stories than anything that is on the Internet.
I’ll give you an example. Check the Internet for stories about politicians and celebrities and you will find lots of gossip. You will see the many salacious stories about them without facts checked, no credible sources or collaborated evidence. But you won’t see them in print. That’s because newspapers and magazines operate under laws of libel. Internet stories, not so much.
Even CREA has a battle on its hands to keep Realtor.ca a source of information that is honest and accurate. So far they are winning but they are fighting powerful organizations like the Competition Bureau who want to cram the system with so many different sources that they threaten the integrity of the information.
If you want real facts from the Internet, I suggest you check the score of the ball game because that’s about the only thing left on line today with any accuracy. If you can find it, that is.
Do you want to know what’s really going on these days? Get off the Internet and pick up a newspaper.
Heino Molls is publisher of REM. Email [email protected].
