By: Melissa Geer

How focused on technology are you?

Do you find newsprint archaic and impractical?  Why would we read a printed copy of the news when we could just search it on our phones and computers?

Newspapers have been around for four hundred years and they are still holding on to that last thread of popularity.  The Haystack, not as popular as the old newspaper once was, interviewed numerous people concerning their opinion of why people don’t read the newspaper.

A good majority of the interviewed stated that if they had a hard copy of The Haystack, they would definitely read it more.  But in the fall of 2009, the highly read Wheat Ridge High School newspaper, The Banner, was eradicated when the advisor left for another job.  And so came The Haystack, when advisor Kay Landon agreed to take over.  Due to the cost of printing, the paper went mostly digital in the 2012-13 school year.

The Haystack, being less popular for numerous reasons, has interesting aspects, according to Lance Austin, history teacher at Wheat Ridge High School.

“I still wish it was in print every month” Austin says.  This is may be one of the reasons The Haystack has lost its readers.   “I think if they got the newspaper sent to them in text, it would get read more” Austin said. “With today’s change in technology and our society in how focused on technology we are, print is losing its popularity.”

The question still stands, why?  Several students stated that if they could get their hands on a copy of a printed newspaper, they would be more than willing to read it.

“At some point I would love to read it, but I just don’t have time” John Perez, sophomore at Wheat Ridge High School, voiced.  It does take time to read the news, any news in fact.  If we, as a school, could take the time we used to read articles in the classroom, newsprint may regain its popularity.

“If I could take time, and it was in print, and I could take time like I used to, to have every student ‘let’s go through and read The Banner’ and now we have lost time in our classes to be able to do stuff like that,” Austin says.

We have reached a point in time, a change in history, where virtual reality and technology have become more important to us as a society than hard, printed, paper.  With a loss in popularity, the newspaper has lost many readers and increased in technology users.  Within the next few generations, I expect that hard print will become a part of history, slowly fading away.