It had to eventually happen

[62Spider]

Some months ago we had a discussion on the dying local papers we dinosaurs love to get in the morning and read with our coffee.My son lives in the west and tried to sign on to the Washington Post to follow his beloved Redskins only to be informed there will be a charge to access the paper. I love the Orioles and Ravens and learned the same thing trying to log onto the Baltimore Sun.I am sure we are headed in that direction for all local papers - "no such thing as a free breakfast". The rate is far lower than home delivery, but there is/will be a charge at some point for all of these newspapers - how do you pay for the folks that write these articles.

If you love a team or city there will be a charge to get the up close and personal coverage the local papers offer. For anyone who gets upset and says they will never read that paper again, I doubt that the editor cares since that person has never paid a penny to begin with.There will always be a place for a local paper- CNN, ESPN and all the rest will cover the big events, but if you want the details on your team you will have to go to the local papers, just as we do today.

Tomorrow morning I will go out to the stoop and pick up my R T-D, knowing it is half the paper it used to be, and only six pages to the sports section - return to the kitchen, pour my coffee and enjoy my local paper and the details it will provide on favorite subjects as the Spiders, Cavs and Hokies. It is battered and bruised, but it will never die.

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[WebSpinner]

i cut out my times dispatch long before i departed richmond and i only get the sunday addition of the houston chronicle and that is for the bride. would never pay to read either paper online and doubt many will. they can try to charge but don't think it will work, yes, some but not enough takers. too much news online with the local tv stations and just online period thru sites like yahoo, which sticks in local stories now anyway. papers will survive to some degree and i do miss the old days, daily press, mornings, times herald, afternoon, times dispatch, morning, news leader, afternoon but they are struggling. heck, my friends in new orleans only get the times picayune about 3 days a week plus a monday sports edition when the nfl is going. at least we are saving a few trees......

 

[Stonewall D]

The Times-Dispatch has really become a local hatchet-job type newspaper. It constantly is trying to dig up dirt on/ tear apart people who do not subscribe to the owners' world view. It has really changed since Warren Buffet's group took over the RTD. I only read the T-D for news about the Spids (as paltry as the coverage is).

 

[Eight Legger]

The news gathering and news dissemination world is ever-changing, and unfortunately most daily papers got people in the habit of not paying for online access years ago. It's difficult for them to try to put the toothpaste back in the tube now and affix a price tag to their content. People stubbornly expect that they are "owed" all of their content for free for some reason.

Couple that with the fact that there are thousands of aggregate sites that simply steal content from legitimate organizations and make money by selling their own advertisements around it, and you've created a citizenry that expects to get all of its news for free, all the time. Until all major papers go to paywalls at the same exact moment, readers will just jump from one site to the next to get their content for free as long as possible.

Most of the legitimate news that you read or hear about still comes from newspapers -- it's just that TV, radio and internet sites regurgitate it as if it were their own so often that it all gets jumbled in the mind of the consumer. At the same time, too many news-gathering organizations have taken the lowest-common-denominator route and just report as "news" information that they all receive from press releases, or meaningless "news" about fires, car accidents and Martha Stewart's dating life.

The rise of Twitter has further eroded news gathering because more individuals can claim to be "reporters" and more news organizations, in an effort to keep up, are giving away even more of their information for free on Twitter.

So on one hand, you have news organizations upset that no one wants to pay for their content. On the other hand, what content are they producing that is worth paying for? In a similar vein, people claim to want real news but seem to eat up the garbage that gets a lot of attention (i.e., some TV actor dies from a drug overdose, Kim Kardashian has a baby), so the news folks say, Well, we'll give them even MORE of it!


It's a sad cycle and will get worse before it gets better. Unfortunately, the correlation I would draw is that as our society has become more technologically advanced, it also has become infinitely lazier and less intelligent.

This post was edited on 7/31 2:30 PM by Eight Legger

 

[urfan1]

EIght, very well said. I subscribe to the online RTD (it is different btw -- more details). But their platform needs much work. It takes way too long to download. It almost doubles the time to "read the paper" due to the downloading.

 

[jrspider]

For what it is worth, The Cleveland Plain Dealer announced yesterday that about a third of its newsroom staff (50 people)had received layoff notices and that beginning next week it is going to reduce home delivery to three days a week plus a "bonus" home-delivered edition on Saturdays. For now, however, the paper will be printed every day and available in designated outlets.