Communication Tech Timeline EOTO

This week's EOTO was on the history of communication tech. The communication tech I researched was the newspaper. The outline for my presentation is below:

"Hey guys, it's Brad.

I’m gonna talk about the history of the newspaper. Now you youngster millennials have probably never even heard of a “news paper”, i know I hadn’t before this. This is because they died in about 2005 because people realized the internet was better and free. To my knowledge, the only person who still reads the newspaper in current year, is my dad.

Before newspapers were invented, people got their news from a giant rock in the middle of town that the
government carved the news into. But after the invention of the printing press, people realized they could write their own news and hand it out to everyone.

The first ever newspaper, called relation, was published in 1605 and it looked like this. It's in German but after translating we find that the website I used to translate it isn't very good. The point is the common folk now has wide access to news that was not made by the government. Of course, the government didn't like this so a lot of newspapers were shut down. Some had to write their papers anonymously so they wouldn't be persecuted.

Anyway, fast forward to the revolutionary war. The United States becomes it's own country and they decide to add freedom of the press to the bill of rights. Newspapers suddenly have the power to do almost whatever they want, and they abuse it. They starting making wacky nonsensical headlines for the sole purpose of grabbing readers attention, a strategy still used by journalists today.

But their quest for infinite money didn't stop there. The news companies think, "why stop at news?" So they start cramming whatever they can into these papers. Restaurant reviews, job listings, opinions, crossword puzzles, obituaries, comics. Although most of these things are pretty boring, people still bought these papers because it's the 1900's, there's no video games or internet yet. Life is extremely boring. So to them, this hodge podge of random information, puzzles, and garfield, distracts them from the monotony of their day to day life.

But then, in the mid 90's, the internet became mainstream. This was the beginning of the end for the newspaper. Most newspapers since have closed. These companies that were once giants in the media world have been reduced to that website we go to for the daily wordle and mini crossword. Luckily, nothing of value was lost because the modern internet just does everything the paper did better. But in it's prime the newspaper was known and read by pretty much everyone, and is recognized as the first ever form of mass media."

Final Thoughts:

Overall there were a few things I did well and a few things I could've done better. I'm proud of my slides and my overall presentation, I was able to speak confidently. When writing though I think I focused too much on my presentation being engaging and funny rather than informative. My presentation didn't have a lot of information about why newspapers were so important, it was more so the history. That's something I want to work on next time.

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/newspaper

https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/chapter/4-2-history-of-newspapers/

https://www.cislm.org/what-history-teaches-us-how-newspapers-have-evolved-to-meet-market-demands/

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=34

https://time.graphics/period/560245

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/interactive/2021/local-news-deserts-expanding/

https://www.psprint.com/resources/history-of-the-printed-newspaper/

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2019/jul/28/history-comics-section/

https://translate.yandex.com/en/ocr

https://books.google.com/books?id=AcHvP9trbkAC&pg=PA2#v=onepage&q&f=false