How the Media Changed: Freshmen Investigate an Information Revolution

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee freshman students interested in media careers through a Living Learning Community were assigned to each interview a person at least 20 years older than they are about changes in the media. For these students, the news is immediate, individualistic, constant, on-demand, and often accessed through social media or a smart phone. Sometimes, they are inundated with stories about newspapers “dying,” but they found that information has exploded into a variety of formats. and they have far more access to it than their parents and grandparents did.

The students discovered that, to their parents, grandparents and other older adults, the news was often a family-based nightly ritual, was a more communal experience delivered at a set time, and was sharply limited in offerings. The interview subjects listened to the Pearl Harbor bombing news over the radio, watched the Challenger explosion on TV, and read seemingly endless Vietnam casualties in the newspaper. The students are too young to have many living memories of even Sept. 11. They are more likely to bring up school shootings as disasters they recall seeing in the news.

The stories the students learned underscored that they are living in an information age and amid a new media revolution that’s occurred in just a few short decades.

It started with a little radio

By Sarah Babcock

The world of technology is undoubtedly a fast-paced and ever-changing one. The ability to stay updated and informed at all times is “astounding,” said Connie Hubatch.

Hubatch, 79, a retired registered nurse from Antigo, Wisconsin, described her adjustment to media and technology as moving quickly.

“It all started out with a little radio when I was young, and now I just ask my smartphone what’s going on, and it tells me. It’s amazing at how far we have come,” said Hubatch.

Hubatch was born and raised in Antigo, Wisconsin, a farming community of about 3,000. She described listening to the radio when she was young and later watching her family’s black- and-white television in high school.

“I didn’t really pay attention to the news and what else was going on in the world. I went to band practice and hung out with my friends,” said Hubatch. This is a great difference compared to her daily ritual of obtaining news today.

Hubatch shared that she uses multiple news stations and newspapers daily to find out what’s going on. Now a resident of Post Lake in Elcho, Wisconsin, it takes one day for the Antigo Daily Journal to reach her home. In the meantime, she goes online to read the daily paper.

Awareness is everything

By Andrew Boldt

Dave Propson, 60, has lived in Dane County for all of his life. His interest in the media, however, has not always been as grounded.

He recalls that the news was a non-factor in his life until he whizzed past his teenage years, and since then he has not turned back.

Once a student at UW-Madison, Propson (who is now a steam-fitting supervisor at his alma-mater) finds himself watching news programs and carefully reading the newspaper during his spare time.

“When you get older, and you have more money, you start paying attention to things like the stock market and politics in general,” Propson says. “It’s much more personal.”

He believes that communication is required in order for a greater understanding and hopes that people find a way to come together.

“Everyone can make rational decisions, stay informed, and explore what’s out there,” he says. To him, awareness is everything worth living for.

Listening to newscast on Pearl Harbor bombing

By Cassandra Bretl

Sue Kashik sat on the living room floor next to the radio with the rest of her family on a night in 1941. The Wisconsin household tuned in to the WGN station when President Franklin D. Roosevelt said the nation had just been bombed at Pearl Harbor.

Now, 74 years later, Kashik sits with her husband, David Bretl, in their Illinois home at any time of day. This luxury did not exist in Kashik’s childhood. People would get their news only at certain times of the day.

Kashik distinctly remembers receiving news as a young adult. She discussed news and current events in her civics class at Algoma High School and listened to ball games on the radio before supper. Media have evolved dramatically since the 1940s and 1950s. A time period of limited communication and restricted time spans of when and where news was presented shifted to complete 24/7 communication.

According to Kashik, “Now, Papa watches the news all day long. I don’t recall news during the day; just at six or at ten.” Receiving news and new media updates in this day and age is nothing outside the norm. In fact, not having availability to media at your fingertips is almost unimaginable.

The evolution of media has, without a doubt, shaped society. Kashik and her husband say the change is good but also leads to negative outcomes. The constant communication among people all over the world, allows people to stay connected and cultured. However, the pointless celebrity gossip and false information can have bad effects, such as cyber bullying and false conclusions.

Even with the constant adaptations to media, some aspects of communication will stay the same. Kashik still reads the newspaper every day and talks to locals about events occurring in the community. Print, broadcast or online news is still essential for society. The change in media will continue to shape society. What will be the next form of media?

Watching the news on black-and-white TV

By Bianca Camiro

Donna Anderson, 74, of Green Bay, grew up on a small farm in Crivitz, Wisconsin. Every night, in the 1950s, she would catch the latest news at 7 p.m. on her black-and-white TV.

Nowadays, people have easy access to the latest news with the click of a button wherever they are and whenever. Back in the late ‘40s and ‘50s, it wasn’t that simple. Anderson was only 13-years-old when her family received its first TV in 1954.She remembers the experience like it was just yesterday.

“Television coming out was a big deal…I would watch ABC, CBS, and the news channels on 2, 5, and 11 on a little black-and-white TV set up in the living room,” Anderson said.

Before the TV came along in the 1950s, radio was one of the main sources of how people got their news. Anderson listened to 1280 WM–AM, her local radio station in Marinette, Wisconsin.

“Not only did they broadcast local news, they played fantastic music,” Anderson said. The station is still up and running to this day, and she still listens to it all the way from Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Over the past 65 years, the way people get their news has changed greatly. For Anderson, it’s gone from watching the local news on a black-and-white TV in Anderson’s family living room and listening to the Marinette station on her transistor radio to watching Fox News Live every day for the past 18 years.

“News channels have gotten better,” Anderson said. “I don’t just want to know what’s happening in my area. I want to know what’s happening all over the world.”

Portable stories

By Hannah Cornish

When talking about how she heard about important news stories when she was young, Patricia Cornish, 46, is sure to emphasize the fact that there was no Internet. The Internet is changing the way people live their lives, and, especially, the way they get their news. With portable computers at our fingertips, we have access to all sorts of stories, big and small.

“We had the newspaper delivered each morning, and we watched the nightly news every evening,” Cornish said.

Information has become a constant in people’s daily lives with the use of social media. Websites like Twitter and Facebook are revolutionizing the way we receive breaking news.

“I remember very vividly my dad making sure I was up and awake to watch as President Nixon resigned the Presidency,” Cornish added. “I was very young, and it was difficult to find any meaning in what was going on, but my dad reiterated that this had never happened before and therefore was history.”

Cornish explained how unique it was to have breaking news.

The population is notified almost instantly now whenever news breaks. There’s no waiting around for the nightly news to inform us of what happened during the day. We usually have already heard.

“I do have a favorite news show I like to watch in the morning, and occasionally I’ll peek at the local newspaper,” Cornish said to describe how her habits haven’t changed immensely. However, she admits that usually the first time she sees a news story is on the Internet.

When TV news was a daily ritual

By Kayla Dungey

Ann Dungey recalls the days when nestling down by the TV at dinner time was a daily ritual in her household because that was the only time news could be watched.

In today’s age, news is more accessible and instant, and people can form many different opinions and access different sources compared to the days when the only ways to obtain the news were one nightly news hour and local newspapers.

Dungey grew up in Puyallup, Washington in the late 1960s-early 1970s and says she obtained news from three different sources: The nightly news hour, the local newspaper, and the “’community gossip.’”

“I remember watching reports on the Vietnam War almost every night,” Dungey says. “It was so bloody and violent, but that’s what we [Dungey and her family] watched because that’s the only news we could watch.”

News was limited to Dungey growing up, and the way news has exploded in the recent decades boggles her mind. She claims that the way news has become so diverse and instant is amazing because we have become more connected on a global scale; we have become more informed faster.

News today has become constant, and any event can be reported somewhere.

“You can go on the Internet or TV anytime to get news. We are saturated with news. It’s incredible how everyone around the world knows what’s going on because of the Internet. It’s like the world is getting smaller,” Dungey says.

Dungey weighs the pros and cons of modern news. She says it’s great to get different perspectives but also bad because there is so much reliance on technology-we need to connect and talk as a community too.

Media at her fingertips

By Morgan Graham

With the amount of the technology readily available, media are becoming instant. As the times change, so do the media. At least in the eyes of Stillwater, Minnesota native, Barb Graham.

As a young girl, Graham recalls waiting for the 10 p.m. news and the weekly community paper to come out. Today in 2015, she has the media right at her fingertips, literally. Due to social media and news accounts right on her smartphone, Graham says that she no longer has to wait for the 10 p.m. news or the weekly paper to find out current events that happened in her community.

Now that media are readily available to most people, Graham believes “the changes [in media] are positive.” When one looks for current events, they can now expand beyond just their community because of the different access points of media now-a-days.

To Graham, the scale of media has gone beyond just community and is now a place to go when looking for world happenings as well as local events. “People are more knowledgeable about what’s going on in the world,” because of the large national and global scale of media,” she said.

A lot of media today is available through online sources, but, even so, the newspapers and television broadcasts that were available to Graham when she was a young girl are still available today. Not only has the presentation of media changed but what is shared has too. Graham believed it was shocking “how much more descriptive [news companies] have become,” which she also believes is a part of the positive change.

Memories of Vietnam news coverage

By Meggie Hall

“It’s crazy how many media outlets there are. There is just so much more of everything,” Tim Hall said, who grew up only listening to Bunny Raasch-Hooten on new channel 12.

Hall, 53, grew up in Milwaukee during the 70s and says his earliest memory from the news was the Vietnam War.

“I remember how World News showed updates from the Vietnam War every single night when I was a child. I just didn’t get the big deal of it back then.”

Hall, who will be approaching 54 soon, said he has mixed views about the changes in the media.

“[People] need to be more cautious, and more aware. I don’t know if this new society is good or bad, I’m more neutral. People just need to be aware of what they say [online].”

Hall described his job doing paper routes as a young boy.

“When I was younger, I would do the Milwaukee Journal paper route every evening at 5 p.m. riding around on my bike to my neighborhood and the ones nearby,” he said. “It’s just weird to think that now I get most of my news from the Internet.”

Highlighting articles in Time Magazine

By Tess Klein

Growing up, Kristi Klein was limited to the amount of news she had access to. Time Magazine and Channel 3 NBC news twice a day were about all there was.

Klein, 45, of Edgerton, remembers sitting in class highlighting articles from Time Magazine a couple times a week when she was in high school.

“Besides what they made us do in school, I didn’t really hear about what was happening in the news,” said Klein, a Radiology Instructor at Madison College.

One memory Klein shared is sitting in health class when her school principal announced over the intercom that the New Hampshire teacher that had been chosen to go to space, Christa McAuliffe, was killed during the mission with the other astronauts.

“If it were today, news like that would’ve been all over social media like Facebook, but the only access we had to it was to turn on the chunky classroom TV set to Channel 3 news,” said Klein.

Watching the Challenger explosion

By Claire Larkin

Stephanie Larkin, 51, Appleton, is a middle school educator who was born into a middle class family with only one small TV – the same TV they sat around to watch President Nixon’s resignation and learned of the explosion of the Challenger.

“We had to manually switch the channels on the TV. My siblings and I would always fight over who had to get up and switch the channel,” Larkin recalls.

Larkin recollects getting most of the important news from the daily town paper as well as watching the evening news after dinner. She explains that TV had only three basic news channels they relied on to get important information.

When asked about how receiving the news and technology has changed over the years, Larkin said, “It has changed immensely. It’s nice in one way because Americans can gain access to important information immediately. However, people have lost the ability to communicate face to face with one another.”

Larkin went more into depth about how these media changes have affected her life and how abruptly they came to be in the year 2015.

“In my fifty one years of living, the ways I have received information have been across the board. It’s crazy to think how much the world of news has changed,” Larkin said.

How MTV changed the media

By Trystan Letourneaux

Every night, Jim Vandenhuevel, born in 1961, and his family, would gather around their small black-and-white television and watch the CBS nightly news.

It was not long, though, before obtaining the news became much easier and more accessible. At the same time, though, the communal rituals around the television became more individualistic.

“MTV had come out with a news segment that not only covered the news but made fun of it… it was really popular with all the college kids,” said Vandenhuevel. He preferred the town’s local newspaper, the Appleton Post Crescent.             The most memorable news story for him was the Vietnam War. Vandenhuevel says the most shocking thing to him was, “the number of casualties that seemed to never stop growing.”

Today, Vandenhuevel enjoys Fox News network and likes the fact that news is being covered 24 hours a day. However, he noted that some singular crime stories are endlessly covered without all questions being answered, so it’s not like a larger news hole has necessarily translated into more or better coverage.

Relying on radio for news

By Danielle Miller

As a child, Vicky Miller grew up on a farm in a small community called Cambria. This community has more farms than businesses. Because of this isolated location, Miller and her family relied heavily on radio for both entertainment and their news.

Now Miller gets a lot of her news online on outlets like Yahoo and Facebook. “You have the world at your fingertips,” she tells her child.

When Miller was a young adult, it was popular for the siblings to have an email. That was considered high tech for them. And where land lines were common place in homes, now they seem almost obsolete. Her computer “was bulky and slow,” and Miller jokes they called the family computer, “the beast.” But now they are slim and sleek and fit in the palm of your hand.

The most memorable time of her youth were the updates on Desert Storm from the coverage all over the TV and radio, listening for the names of those she went to school with who were deployed.

Now as an adult with her own family, the most shocking change is how fast the Internet is and how great its reach is around the world. Compared to her childhood, today’s media are all about portability.

The downside, Miller thinks, is how with all new media outlets, “there is no privacy, all the boundaries are being crossed,” and everything wasn’t on display for all to see.

Miller grew up in a world with a fast-pace change in technology and connection. The news was all about Wisconsin, and barely about events around the world. Entertainment came from listening to the radio in the tractors they drove around the farm.

Looking up news on the iPhone

By Madison Schebel

It was almost 6 o’clock on Sunday, and Bruce Reinhart began to make his way to the living room to tune in to the local news. Now he’s a 65-year-old man who keeps up to date with the latest headliners.

It’s weird to think how different times have changed. Reinhart, who grew up in Minnetonka, Minnesota, chatted about the news back in his day. Image a world without smartphones and instant alerts.

Back when Reinhart was about 6-years-old, he began tuning in to the news occasionally with his father. “We only had one TV and of course it was black-and-white and very, very tiny,” he explained. If he happened to miss the Sunday news, he’d run down to the corner store and pick up the most recent newspaper.

He now tries to keep up to date with the latest news and gossip. He even ditched the newspapers and now uses his iPhone 5 to look up the news stories for the day. Aside from his phone, he still tunes in to the news twice daily, once in the morning on Fox News, and once at night on CNN. Crazy to think within 60 years so much has changed and continues to change with the growth of our world of technology.

Watching Nixon’s resignation

By Leah Grygleski

Ann Grygleski recalled sitting at her cousins’ house as Richard Nixon delivered his resignation speech on live television. She remembered hearing of the Challenger incident over the radio as she worked in 1986. She called to mind the ordeal on 9/11 when everyone urgently awaited updates from TV news about the situation at the World Trade Center.

She noted that the largest change in today’s news is the accessibility from a variety of sources. Grygleski grew up receiving news through radio, television and newspapers in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

“News is streaming live in public places like doctor/dentist offices, airports, train stations, restaurants, workplaces, etc. – places where there never used to be TVs,” said Grygleski.

News stations have become businesses focused on making money rather than informing the public about important issues. Grygleski explained how this may add bias to news stories that manipulate the news story being portrayed passive.