In 1721, James Franklin, Benjamin's older brother, printed the first American newspaper – The New England Courant. Its sole purpose was to spread news and awareness to the masses in the quickest possible manner. For the next three centuries, Americans would get their news in this way.

However, recently, the newspaper has begun a steady decline. "Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared, " according to "Out of Print: The Death and Life of the American Newspaper," an article which appeared in the The New Yorker in 2008. These number are staggering. The newspaper business has not been able to adapt to the recent trend of readers who prefer to get their information online. The executive editor of the Times, Bill Keller, stated, "At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, 'How are you?,' in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce." The newspaper, as we know it in the United States, may soon become extinct.

Philip Meyer, in his book The Vanishing Newspaper, predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody's doorstep one day in 2043 – a dark day for journalism. That is, unless the newspaper can make a resurgence. Newspapers have even created their own websites in an attempt to benefit from the wave of online readers and to counteract the effect the Internet has had on print revenue. Yet these attempts are not enough to replace the lost income from print advertisements and general circulation.

Because of this loss in financial backing, newspapers have been forced to make changes. As the former columnist Molly Irvins argued, the newspaper companies' solution to their problems was to make "our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting." With the current financial hardships, newspapers have been forced to scale back their coverage, only playing into the decline of the printed paper.

Yet, even with all the cutbacks, the newspaper will always have a place in American culture, despite the current tendencies of readers to surf the web instead of flipping the pages of their local paper. The fact is, not all online "news sources" are reliable. Anyone can post their opinion online. These articles are not always fact-checked the way newspapers are.

Don't get me wrong, there are credible online resources in which people can receive up-to-date information regarding nearly any aspect of world news. But for every credible website, there are dozens of misleading and often untrue online sources claiming to be legitimate news providers. Some readers, who do not know any better, mistake these websites for credible news sources – thus further spreading this misinformation. Because of these inconsistencies and the inability to fully monitor the information on the web, the newspaper will continue to be the best source of factual and reliable news coverage available to the people.

Newspapers are also more readily accessible to the masses. Even though we are living in a technological world, many people are still without convenient Internet connections. For these people, the only real source of news they have is the newspaper – which is still the best way to communicate to he people as a whole. By losing the newspaper, we would be losing our national voice.

So do your local newspaper a favor and grab a copy of The Baltimore Sun or even The Retriever Weekly, and do not let these institutions fade away. As they say, you don't know what you've got until it's gone. So do not take the newspapers for granted, or you may soon be without it.