[NA] Newspapers

RyanB

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Maybe I’m just too young to ever remember, but do people really still rely on newspapers to get their news? Seems like newspapers would have gone by the way side atleast a decade ago when the digital era introduced itself. Granted, I know that everyone isn’t up to speed on gathering their news over the internet, but it still surprises me when I see people reading over the newspaper like a fine tooth comb. Maybe it’s just one of those timeless activities that won’t end until the fat lady sings. I dunno.
 
I used to be a newspaper junkie, think it came with flying at the airline. You know, free USA plus papers left on the plane by passengers. :D

Birmingham went to 3 days a week and the news was so friggin old by the time you got the paper so I let my subscription expire. Grew up reading papers but don't necessarily miss them. All online news now, definitely can't watch TV news, all of them slanted as hell.
 
Judging by what people think the truth is about various things when you ask them? Nope. They're just watching the propaganda channels, or paying for propaganda with click-views on websites.

We won't see a daily document delivery with proper editorial oversight (hell, it would be nice if they could even spell) and multiple-angle articles in it, ever again.

Propaganda websites and TV channels have taken over.
 
Maybe I’m just too young to ever remember, but do people really still rely on newspapers to get their news?
Just today, someone emailed me and asked if I had seen something in the local newspaper. No. I haven't gotten a subscription in at least 20 years, and I haven't read a newspaper at all in a long time.
 
I used to be a newspaper junkie, think it came with flying at the airline. You know, free USA plus papers left on the plane by passengers. :D

Birmingham went to 3 days a week and the news was so friggin old by the time you got the paper so I let my subscription expire. Grew up reading papers but don't necessarily miss them. All online news now, definitely can't watch TV news, all of them slanted as hell.
Yeah, I’ll drive through the neighborhood and see that rolled up newspaper laying in driveways. I envision that little newspaper boy with a bicycle riding up and down the streets... I supposed it gives someone a job anyway. Still surprises me that the service in general is still existent in this day and age.
 
I hate the small free local ones that get tossed in the driveway without my requesting it. I'm really surprised that is legal. Seems like littering to me.
 
Oh, I dunno. I suspect that as long as young puppies need a place to poop while being housebroken, newspapers will continue to fulfill their most fitting purpose.
 
I hate the small free local ones that get tossed in the driveway without my requesting it. I'm really surprised that is legal. Seems like littering to me.
I actually like them because I use them for kindling in my charcoal chimney starter.

As for the OP's query about major newspapers, I kind of like to peruse them if I have a few minutes to kill and one is handy. It's a different style of writing altogether. But no way I'd pay for one.
 
I liked the wall st journal, used to subscribe electronically. Then it went up to about $400 per year, nope, not going to pay that. The big papers are suffering, for a variety of reasons. Honestly I can't wait til they die.
 
They got coupons all in one spot you don't have to go to 1700 different websites to get coupons to go grocery shopping.
 
I subscribe to the Dallas Morning News and the Wall Street Journal. I read 'em while I'm eating breakfast.

I'm just about done with the DMN. Anymore they just reprint the New York Times. I really don't care to read that crap, and the cost is ridiculous.
 
I hate the small free local ones that get tossed in the driveway without my requesting it. I'm really surprised that is legal. Seems like littering to me.
I hate those too, they go straight into the trash.

I used to read the paper when I was a kid and if our local paper hadn't gotten so crappy (slanted toward a certain political party) I would subscribe today. I always enjoyed reading the paper while I ate my breakfast.
 
I read 'em while I'm eating breakfast.

I still buy USA Today basically to read when I eat. And I don't really get it for the immediate headline news, but all the other things like business stories, sports, entertainment, etc. My mother that we take care of is 90 and still gets the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The sports and comics out of that are my morning bathroom read. Yeah, TMI. :D
 
When I got out of college in 1983, I was a newspaper reporter for seven years. In those days, we had copy editors and fact checkers. If we came across what we thought was a good story beyond the daily grind, we had to pitch it to an editor, who pitched it to another editor, and on and on, depending on the resources the research would take. When we got done writing an article, it would get scrutinized by at least two editors, often more. Assumptions stated, facts backed up with documentation, sources proven. The strength of the economy meant lots of ad dollars, which meant lots of revenue for the paper. There were resources to support enterprise journalism. My papers sent me across the country on research trips, even to Africa for two weeks during the Ethiopian famine.

The issue from my perspective is that the internet killed the economics of the publishing business. "Faster and cheaper" became the mantra. Resources dried up. The time to produce thoughtful and well researched articles evaporated. The need to explain your research and justify conclusions before publication was a casualty of cost cutting. The public expected the content on the internet to be free. I went from newspapers to the aviation press (ah, THOSE were the days!) but the problem was even worse there.

Another dynamic is that less skilled/disciplined people went into journalism because of the rise of the celebrity journalist. When I was a reporter, you NEVER saw phrases like "... told me in an interview." We were forbidden from injecting ourselves into the story. Now, that is routine. In addition, the removal of the gatekeeper function of editor has democratized publishing, but as a result the quantity of garbage being published has exploded. Newspapers and TV news are filled with poor grammar, factual errors, false assumptions, opinion. No thank you.
 
The only paper I have ever read consistently was Stars and Stripes while stationed in Germany in the early 80’s. TV was a little thin for entertainment, let alone for news, so S&S was the source for a lot of us. I seem to recall that you could buy U.S. newspapers or have them mailed over, but that was a little slower.

I’m blown away by the $$ the digitized newspapers want today.
 
I'm thinking about subscribing to one or two. All the "local" news sites (which are run by dead-tree newspapers) that I used to read are now paywalled, no doubt due in large part to ad-blocking software killing their ad revenue. So now you have to have a subscription to read more than whatever number of free articles they allow in a month.

The thing is that the cost for paper subscriptions (which include digital access) are only a few dollars more per month than digital-only subscriptions, no doubt so they can claim higher paid circulation for the paper editions. They also have deals with the post office that allow them to drop off the papers at the local PO as opposed to mailing them from the points of origin, so the subscribers get the papers on their actual dates (albeit at 11:00 a.m., but they also include the digital subscription for early-morning reading).

The only down side would be that I'd have to schlep all those papers to the dump transfer station when I was through reading them, which is kind of a drag. So I may opt for digital-only.

The other option would be to just circumvent the paywalls, which I'm not going to do, despite it being pretty easy. Quick glances at the source for the pages revealed that they depend on JS and cookies, both of which can be easily dealt with. But I consider that theft, as does the DMCA.

Rich
 
The only thing I liked about living in DC was getting the Washington Post for the cost of a newspaper. I really did like the Post (this was in the 90's), the internet wasn't quite yet a thing, and they had the best reporters, found the best stories. I am surprised any newspapers have survived the digital age. I agree, the effect on journalism in this country has been nothing short of catastrophic.
 
doing the sunday NY Times crossword puzzle has been a family tradition for years. but yeah, it's kinda funny seeing a newspaper these days.
 
Reading our local paper used to be one of my daily highlights. They did a great job and the paper was owned by the same family for over a hundred years. Circulation declined rapidly 7-8 years ago, from 25,000 to 17,000 and they sold it to a company that owns a number of papers. They fired most of the reporters, editors, columnists, etc. and it's all just the same thing I'm reading on the online news sites. There's no local flavor.

Once a week I get a sales call trying to get me to take the paper back. Yesterday's offer was delivery 7 days a week for 1/2 the price of just the Sunday paper. Seventy five cents a week, and I still turned it down.
 
Phone booths, where'd they go? How we supposed to squeeze 20 guys into a booth? Geesh...

image.jpeg
 
Print journalism is failing rapidly. It is hard to compete in a world of instant gratification and real time news. By the time a story is printed and distributed, its old news and may even be incorrect. As the print companies suffer, they cut staff and depend more on AP wire stories and such to fill the pages instead of local content, which is even worse as those national stories have already been beat to death.

Some local papers have tried to turn to the internet, but its hard to make any profit without either pay subscriptions or popups galore, two things that most major news sites can survive without just due to nationwide traffic. Sadly in another 5 to 10 years I don't know where one will find actual local news.

Journalism as a whole is an entire other topic. Reporting on Tweets via Tweets, with no substance or fact checking, and tons of bias thrown in to top it off.
 
I personally know a few columnists for the local paper. Former columnists, that is. The writing has been on the wall for several years, the paper itself does not expect to exist as a print media for more than five years.
 
I think I'm pretty much echoing others here, but...

Haven't had a newspaper subscription since the 80s. I actually got turned off of that when I discovered that it was no longer being delivered by paper boys (or girls), but rather by an old lady driving around in an old beat up car. It just kind of ruined it for me.

However, I would buy papers off the rack quite often back then. I think the last time I bought a paper off the rack was when I friend of mine, along with a co-worker, made the front page after getting killed in a fire (he was a paramedic).

As far as online news is concerned, I used to surf Jacksonville.com, which was the local news paper. That site, which was considered one of the best in the country, has continued to go downhill since the late 90s. It seems that I now get most of my US news, from the BBC. It's nice having a site that doesn't bombard you with advertisements that are disguised as news stories and doesn't constantly re-load while you're reading a story or skimming headlines. Overall, the news isn't important enough to me to pay for it anymore.

Slightly related are magazines. I used to subscribe to a bunch. However, just like newspapers, they started becoming more and more irrelevant to me. Right now the only ones I get are a result of my memberships, and I'm even considering opting to get those digitally and ignoring them. What's really funny is that I originally joined those organizations to get the magazine.
 
I miss Al Jazeera. They had a US branch. I know, I know, their employers might not have been folks with whom I'd want to associate. But it was cool seeing competent journalism from someone who didn't have a dog in the hunt. The problem with US journalism is the whole thing has become so politicized that it becomes difficult (and sometimes outright impossible) to tell what's true.
 
The problem with US journalism is the whole thing has become so politicized that it becomes difficult (and sometimes outright impossible) to tell what's true.

It doesn't even have to be political. They just make stuff up now. My brother's friend was a victim (1 of 3) of an armed robbery at a Sprint store in Texas. His recount of the story vs what was "reported" was not even close. It was as if the entire account in the news was completely fictional.
 
It doesn't even have to be political. They just make stuff up now. My brother's friend was a victim (1 of 3) of an armed robbery at a Sprint store in Texas. His recount of the story vs what was "reported" was not even close. It was as if the entire account in the news was completely fictional.

like when they reported we landed on the moon?
 
We still subscribe.

comics
crosswords
sudoku

I'll generally go through it for the local news - no sense getting the national news from a paper since it's usually from a wire service that all the news.com websites pick up anyway. But if you want to keep up with what's happening in town, the only way to know that is by the local paper or its website duplicate.

Fortunately, the KC Star has, and has had, some very good sports columnists over the years and it's been a pleasure to read them. The best ones don't really write "about" sports, but they can write "about" life and use sports for illustration. Joe, the story about a golf tournament he attended and how his daughter took her first steps that weekend in the hotel lobby. Or Sam, or Vahe and their stories about their parents and how sports connected them. Or the obituary (I really wish I could find that column, I can't remember who wrote it) 20 years ago when Dan Quisenberry died - a page about his accomplishments in his community, his family, his church, and barely a single word about his baseball career.

Sometimes you need a folded up newspaper to soak that stuff up, it just doesn't feel the same on a monitor.
 
The "news" part mostly has disappeared from the front page anyway - it's largely features and/or editorials now. I live in metro DC, and my wife subcribes to the very left wing Post and the mucho right wing Times. It's pretty funny comparing the front pages each morning, and the Post, for all it's rep, isn't particularly better at objective reporting than the Times. She likes the local news, croswords. I used to like the Post sports, but the reporting has become so politizied, with do much slanted cultural commentary, that I'm drifting away from it now. I read Shirley Povich in the Post, when I delivered the paper as a kid - not
seeing that quality of writing niw, that level of articulation and observation.
 
Another dynamic is that less skilled/disciplined people went into journalism because of the rise of the celebrity journalist. When I was a reporter, you NEVER saw phrases like "... told me in an interview." We were forbidden from injecting ourselves into the story. Now, that is routine. In addition, the removal of the gatekeeper function of editor has democratized publishing, but as a result the quantity of garbage being published has exploded. Newspapers and TV news are filled with poor grammar, factual errors, false assumptions, opinion. No thank you.

No kidding there. This "noun, pronoun" way of speaking is going through TV news like a virus. One particular "reporter" on KOMO TV in Seattle is particularly bad. I complained on their on-line tool once and he improved - briefly. He's back to it in full force. "Joe Blow, he" gets on my nerves. And anytime they do a story on something I know something about, they screw it up. Every time!

If I weren't happily retired, I'd want the TV weather guesser's job. Where else can you be wrong so often and keep your job? And, I assume, get paid well for being wrong so often? :D

I don't subscribe to the local paper anymore. The Olympian (or as locals call it, the Daily Zero) is now published in Tacoma and much of the "news" is about Tacoma, not Olympia. We subscribed to the Sunday paper for a while to get the ads, but even those wound up being a waste of time. So I let the subscription run out. At least, that was my plan. Seems they had some fine print in the paper and the renewal notices saying that I had to let them know that I wasn't renewing, or else it was automatic. And they turned me over to collections when I told them to take that last bill and stuff it. I paid the collections company as it wasn't worth getting my credit score trashed over less than $20, but I'll NEVER subscribe to that rag again. Any other periodical gets the message when you don't send them money, they stop sending their publication when the subscription runs out. The "local" paper is somehow special? And papers wonder why they are dying?
 
For local news I rely on the local news television stations. They are the ones actually getting the story anyway, but obviously the variety and depth of reporting is less than what print media would typically provide. Social media actually works pretty well for local social events and breaking news. I usually just peruse Reuters/Reason.com or similar to see the world news/political stuff without too much biased commentary.
 
First time I've read a physical newspaper was actually yesterday when I checked into my hotel room and picked up a copy of USA Today.

I don't expect to read another paper until my next out-of-town trip.

Newspapers at least have some marginal value. Phone books not so much. When I lived in Silicon Valley, I got a couple thick phonebooks every year, one white pages, and one yellow pages. Talk about useless! I picked them up, took them out of their protective phone book condom (aka plastic wrapper), and threw them into the recycling bin.

Who uses phone books anymore? I haven't relied on phone books since people stopped subscribing to land lines 20 years ago (which removed the need for white pages), and the Internet and review sites like Yelp popped up (which removed the need for yellow pages).

I seriously cannot imagine having a need for a phone book anymore. Ever. I can't even believe they get enough advertising dollars to support publishing them. I guess even more surprising than "Who uses phone books anymore" is "Why are people spending money advertising in them?" Boggles my mind.
 
I seriously cannot imagine having a need for a phone book anymore. Ever. I can't even believe they get enough advertising dollars to support publishing them. I guess even more surprising than "Who uses phone books anymore" is "Why are people spending money advertising in them?" Boggles my mind.
They are useful for booster seats when friends bring young children along with them.
 
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