Webupon

I used to be an avid newspaper buyer. Each day, without fail, I would go out and buy at least one. I like to keep on top of current affairs, and the crosswords were my tea time getaway. I know plenty of people like that, or at least they used to be. But now, with the rise of the internet within the past 10 years, the internet seems to have everything that once you had to switch on the TV to see, or the radio to hear.

In the mornings, my routine always consisted of up out of bed at 06.30am and get the kettle on for the morning caffeine hit. I’d switch on the television and see what was happening in the world, usually watching Sky News. But no, not anymore. I get the kettle on and switch on my laptop, where I go straight to my homepage which is a news site. Throughout the day, even in work, I can go and do crosswords all for free on the internet. I mean, I don’t even have to pay for it.

It seems that I am not the only one that has made the change either. Moving from watching TV to watching online, or from reading the paper to reading online news pages. With the rise of Blackberries and increasing costs, are people even willing anymore to shell out an average of £1.00 per paper? I think not. Just head down to the tube station at 07.30am on a Monday morning. The place is packed with 50 people waiting, and only 5 are reading a paper. The rest are either on a mobile phone or are on Blackberries. A stark contrast with that of 10 years ago when nearly every person there would have had a paper in their hands.

With different ways of keeping up to date with affairs becoming available each year at increasingly low prices, are people really going to go back to the old ways? Indeed, with graduates entering jobs at say the age of 21-25, they have grown up in an era of mobile phones and hand held computers. They didn’t grow up needing to read a paper to find out what was going on. And with advertisers now placing a lot more money on advertising over the internet, are traditional methods of communication going to fade and eventually die out? We’ll just have to wait and see. But one thing’s for sure – the internet is here to stay.