Black and White and Read all over...

[susandennis]

My parents and grandparents (both sides) started every day with the newspaper. And so do I. I always have. But, I'm beginning to wonder if I always will.

We have two morning daily newspapers in Seattle. Earlier this year, after many years, I switched from one to the other because the one had dropped all of my favorite newspapery things. Now the other one has pretty much done the same. And I'm thinking about saying good bye to it, too. The daily edition has shrunk down to Hardly Worth The Effort and the Sunday paper is a shadow of its former self.

Yesterday the Christian Science Monitor gave up the daily ghost. News reports of its end stated that newspapers nationwide have seen a drop in circulation.

If all of them have gotten as crappy as our newspapers here, I can certainly understand the drop in circulation. The cost has gone up $40 over the past year so that now I'm paying $240 a year for this nearly worse every day experience.

Neither one of the papers has an online edition that I'm comfortable with. At least not so far. But for $240 a year, I could probably deal.

I pay the bill quarterly and I just paid it for this quarter. My Google calendar will ping me in about 2.5 months to reconsider resubscribing. Between now and then I'm going to continue to look at each edition with a 'what would today have been like had I not read that' point of view.

We shall see.

Comments

[cathboblet.livejournal.com]

I start every morning with the paper too, but all of it online. I read the NYTimes, and the local paper, and often some of my favorite political blogs. While I've been sick these last couple of weeks I've even done it in bed, tucked up with a cup of tea. I like the routine of it, and don't miss the physical paper at all.

I recently house sat for some folks who were away for three weeks, and wanted me to save the Times for them every day that it was delivered. It was nuts! 'Cause I realized that the paper delivered to their front door every morning was already out of date, compared to the one I was reading on my laptop - plus who has time to go back through three weeks of papers?

[susandennis]

I'm going to try but I just can't get comfortable with online newspapers. I can't find what I want when I want it and keep stumbling over stuff. the NYTimes is particularly cumbersome to me.

But, I am going to try and see if I can get used to some online paper somehow.

[kyrielle]

What about Google news alerts or something similar to pull what you are interested in?

[susandennis]

Wouldn't it be great if I could fashion a google query that equaled "all of the stuff I used to love to read in my morning paper".

I know it's all out there somewhere.

Actually, for a lot of local news, we have to very good city-wide blogs.

[kishenehn.livejournal.com]

I've been wondering about that too, lately. I always leaf through the paper every morning, but the only things in it that seem to be worth my time nowadays are the crossword puzzle and the sudoku. Sigh.

There are still a few good newspapers, though. If I had a bigger pile of money in my bank account, I'd probably subscribe to the International Herald Tribune.

[susandennis]

But, if I got the International Herald Tribune, I'd expect to be hearing a foreign language and have some kind of fabulous buttery pastry on the table with dudes puffing cigarettes all around me.

I haven't actually thought about that paper in years but when I do, I seriously, get that overseas feeling fast! Thanks for the mini trip!

[rsc.livejournal.com]

I hardly know how to eat breakfast without a newspaper on the table. Mostly for the sports, the comics, the bridge column, and the puzzles.

Monday's Globe arrived missing the section that contains the last three abovenamed; and because it was the Monday after Dance Camp weekend, we had gotten up late, and they won't redeliver after 10:00. I was not happy.

[susandennis]

It's just those kind of newspaper 'toys', that our papers are dropping like flies. We have not had a bridge column in forever.

[howeird]

I shed no tears for the biggest tree-killers on the planet. Espeically the Timid and the Lost-Inteligencer. Let me tell you a story:

At the UW, back when I was a Communications major, the first day of one of my journalism classes, the professor read us a letter from a newspaper publisher friend. It went something like this:

"Before I visited, they told me not to expect much from the Seattle newspapers, that they were second-rate.

They were wrong. They are fifth-rate."

CSM

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

I was just about to resubscribe! Darn.

Re: CSM

[susandennis]

ha! go ahead. i did. i'm going to pay attention to what i get from the newspaper and see if i can find a comfortable online way to get the same thing.

[machupicchu.livejournal.com]

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Interesting -- I was just emailed a New York Times story (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/business/media/29carr.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=mourning%20old%20media's%20decline&st=cse&oref=slogin) today about this very thing.

And you raise an interesting point that that article doesn't. You're losing interest in your newspaper because of the loss of features that the newspaper is presumably dropping with the intent of saving money -- but how does it save them money in the long run if it only results in continually decreasing readership, which loses more ad revenue, which continues to shrink the publication until it finally dies? It's a vicious cycle.

There's no easy solution to this, but I would think that as more and more people abandon print media for online media, it would make more sense for the papers to retain the fun stuff that a lot of people -- like you -- keep their subscriptions for.
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