My paper route began the minute school was out. I was a fourth-grade student with a 10-speed bike. Not like the bikes we have now, but it was still a good bike for getting me from school to my paper pick-up location in the small west-central Minnesota town I grew up in. My supervisor was strict that I get my papers out ASAP. Our customers were waiting for the daily news, livestock prices and the latest stock-market information. I was not to go home to grab a snack or play with my friends until the last paper was delivered. The customers were waiting for the afternoon edition, and it was up to me to get it to them in a timely manner — rain, sleet, snow, or sunshine. Times have changed.
We could count on our papers to give us their best reporting with an effort to create informative and unbiased articles. We could rely on their code of ethics that what we were reading was credible information and centered on facts. Times have changed. Information is now instantaneous with our electronic services. Instead of relying on newspapers for timely information, we have choices of internet sites that can give us what we want at any time of the day and anywhere we can get a signal or connect to wifi ... for good and for the bad.
With our newspapers disappearing and our local Hutchinson Leader shutting down their services for the last time this month, we have more reason to teach our children the skills, knowledge and ethical behaviors with digital technology. We need to teach them where to find good information that is unbiased, trustworthy and safe. This is not new information for most parents of younger children. However, it is becoming more evident that our social media feeds are becoming more aware of behavior psychology. Sites including social media know how to entice young readers to their sites as well as how to make their sites addictive with no regard to ethics, safety or the truth. Many of these are unfiltered forums that have no consequences for behaviors from users outside of deleting a post long after it has been seen by many. We will need to help our children find credible sites, ones that you can rely on being informative, safe, and unbiased.
Thank you to our Hutchinson Leader for all that you have done for our school. Thank you for well-written articles that have our community as the centerpiece. Each Wednesday we would get a stack of papers for our students to read about our community, clip out pictures for reports, circle the nouns and adjectives, check on our local teams, and have classroom discussions about what is happening in Hutchinson. We are sad to see it go. We all will need to share in the responsibility of teaching our children the skills to research information that is reliable and to always search for the facts.
— Dan Olberg is principal at Park Elementary School in Hutchinson.
