The mid-1990s were witness to big change. It was the post-Cold War era. The Soviet Union dissolved. It was a decade marked by signficant advances in technology, including gene-therapy advances and the improvement of the World Wide Web. A generation of Millennials was about to be replaced by Generation Z, which was born into a world increasing going online.
Email made its debut in our everyday lives in the end of the 1990s, emerging from its roots in business, government and other industrial and institutional organizations. By the time the smartphone entered the picture in the early 2010s, the Boomer group was entering middle age and/or about to turn 65 as the oldest of the generation.
The first iPhone gave us desktop-like email and a web browser. Its impact as a smartphone — combining “phone, internet and email,” as Steve Jobs put it back then — became obvious overnight, and its evolution continues to propel change in our lives.
The iPhone was launched in the summer of 2007. Back then, The Lakeville Journal and The Millerton News were carrying ads in their pages noting that these newspapers were “your best source of weekly news and information about towns, people, schools, sports and organizations in the tri-corner region.” The big heading on the advertisement read “Stay Informed.”
How things change.
Today, about nine in ten adults get some of their news online, whether it’s from a mobile phone or tablet or desktop. Traditional newspapers, adapting to change, have adopted a digital presence — and there also are new sources of news that never existed as a print product, making their start on the web. Some print publications also have been reborn as web ‘papers.’
Last fall, The Pew Research Center published a study showing that a smaller and smaller share of America’s adult population is following the news closely. It also found that the old media — local TV, newspapers and radio — are losing the war for readers, watchers and listeners to new kinds of platforms, such as podcasts. Out of 136 newspapers included in the Pew analysis, 120 reported declines in circulation in 2022. Overall, daily newspaper circulation nationwide continues to decline — including digital subscriptions and print circulation.
But Pew researchers found that about half of all Americans listened to a podcast in 2022, and that most of the listeners come across news in the programming. And podcasts are popular: of those who listen, one in five reports that they listen every day.
We are grateful for our readers and advertisers and supporters of our 501 (c)(3) nonprofit. Because of you we are still here, 127 years later. Every week!
Our mission is to deliver high quality coverage of your community. And for years, The Lakeville Journal and The Millerton News have published news and information online. Last month, the papers launched a major and modern upgrade. In updating our web presence, we geared the look-and-feel to work well on mobile phones. Our sites are not behind a paywall. Anyone can go to www.lakevillejournal.com or www.millertonnews.com — for free.
In 17 years there have been 34 iterations of the iPhone. Today, our appeal to you still works. We invite all generations to ‘Stay Informed’ by visiting www.lakevillejournal.com and www.,millertonnews.com.
Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.L. Tomaino 
