Save the News

Photo taken by Lindsay Beyer

Recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of articles and hearing a lot about how my generation is not hearing the news anymore. Apparently, we have no interest in hearing what’s going on around us. While not all of us ignore the news, the number of people who access the news has gone down dramatically over the years(pg 2).

Now, I have to admit, until this semester I didn’t care much about getting the news either. My major requires that I take a Reporting I class, and one of the assignments is to stay up to date on current events. Man, was I missing out.

I now have come to realize how important it is for my generation to know what’s going on in the world. Being informed on current events has not only made me more knowledgeable, but I’ve also been able to literally watch history happen. This is important stuff that most teens these days seem to be ignoring.

Take the Russia-Crimea debacle. History is happening right before our eyes and when I talk to my friends about it, most of them don’t know anything about what’s going on over there. Or when Malaysia Flight 370, disappeared without a trace, none of my friends had any idea what I was talking about when I first brought it up. That’s a bit scary.

We just aren’t interested in informing ourselves like we should be. We need to know what’s going on in the world not only because it is history, but we will be running the world one day and it’s important to be knowledgeable on all fronts. We must instill in ourselves the desire to be informed.

Paula Poindexter is interested in stopping this decline in readership in the Millennial Generation. She is hosting a “National News Engagement Day” in an attempt to get not only teenagers but also their parents interested in the news again. She has also created a Facebook page just for getting news to the Millennial Generation.

I think “National News Engagement Day” will be a perfect way to explain to this generation how important it is to be informed and how much of a purpose it can serve us in our every day lives. With everything go on in the world around us, it’s increasingly important to follow the news. We must be a more educated generation.

There’s several ways to easily get the news that are more “Millennial” friendly. There are Facebook pages as mentioned above, Tumblr blogs, Twitter accounts, and even new phone apps such as Paper which brings the news right to my media-savvy peers. I think once we help my generation take advantage of these tools, we can have a more informed generation, which is incredibly important for us now and in the future.