Newspapers' demise will accelerate this year as the economy falters. It will probably be one of the first things people cut out of their discretionary expenses.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
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It's RedsZone's fault, really. When I was a kid I got my baseball news from the paper. Now I get it from a bunch of knuckleheads on the Internet.
If I haven't read it yet then it's still news to me.Newspapers are great if you want to read yesterdays news
-LTlabnerIf you can't build a winning team with that core a fire-sale isn't the solution. Selling the franchise, moving them to Nashville and converting GABP into a used car lot is.
what most people don't know is just how profitable a newspaper typically is. It's one of the more profitable businesses in America - Media companies still make 8-10% profit a year in down markets, twice that when times are good. If they'd re-invest that into their product rather than fattening their wallets - we wouldn't be talking about why they are a dying industry.
I got laid off from one paper because we didn't hit our 12% profit for the year and the newsroom had to be cut by 50 employees. Not that we lost money - it's just that 9% profit for the year was too far off the 12% goal and heads had to roll. That's a great feeling - here is your pink slip because you didn't make our stockholders enough money last year - but thanks for that 9%.
Yes, for most of the nation's history, Wall Street wasn't the way we got our news. Local cranks and pamphleteers, a printer who wanted to keep his press busy, rich local families and Mark Cuban-type egos. Print newspapers are going to have to find non-Wall Street models.
My job is to be a newspaper's Paul DePodesta. I predict print newspapers will be around for a while, on a smaller scale, like suburban weeklies and shoppers, plus Sunday newspaper flagships, for people who want the reading experience. Meanwhile, we'll get more news than ever, digitally.
My uncle was a newspaper editor, and I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for all the history and tradition of the newspaper business.
One of my favorite parts of HBO's "Deadwood" was the look at the local one man newspaper office.
I don't get a daily anymore, though. I can't imagine what it would be like without the Sunday NY Times, though.
We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost effective ~ Kurt Vonnegut
USA Today has increased to $1.00/day effective 12/8. I'm finding it harder to justify paying that price but I'm a newspaper junkie. I just don't like the format of reading it online.
What I find interesting is that our local city paper, a suburban weekly, went to a business model whereby it just started putting papers in everybody's mailbox for free. Apparently, it's ad sales went up so much that it was actually able to add a Wednesday edition to its normal Saturday publication. The other thing it started to do was share columnists with the other suburban papers so that it only had its beat writers and editors as its staff. The result is that we get a lot more information on the goings on at city hall, the school board, and the high school sports teams, and a regionalized focus to columns, entertainment and lifestyle offerings.
On another topic, I think one issue that affects newspapers is the recycling problem. I like reading my news online because I don't have to worry about stacks of newsprint at home each week that I have to deal with by putting out with the recycling. When I had a daily subscription, I felt like I was wasting so much paper to read the few articles and columns I hadn't already seen online.
Wear gaudy colors, or avoid display. Lay a million eggs or give birth to one. The fittest shall survive, yet the unfit may live. Be like your ancestors or be different. We must repeat!
News is 24/7 now. Print newspapers can't accommodate that, at least not in the traditional format.
All models are wrong. Some of them are useful.
Ridiculous.
"24/7 News" usually consists of some combination of the following:
A "news presenter" reading headlines.
A "reporter" giving 30-40 second sound bytes from a scene.
An "analysis" segment that consists of one mouthpiece from one side, one mouthpiece from another side, and talking points yelled loudly back and forth.
All of these things, mind you, are in a national format.
The mistake newspapers made was trying to compete with this, while scaling back the things the format does well: long-term investigative reporting, in-depth presentation of facts, civil analysis of issues, and extensive local coverage
The internet and cable television do many things well, but so does a well-run newspaper. Maybe the real problem is that people don't care about those things anymore and would actually rather be shouted at by the TV.
Cincinnati Reds: Farm System Champions 2022
I think what he means is that you don't have to wait until 8am to get the news while you read your coffee. You get your news all the time. You can go online or turn on Headline news or even go to the same newspapers website and get up to date information at that moment.
So if you already read todays news then why would you spend 30 minutes reading it tomorrow morning?
I grew up with newspapers. As a 7 year old I was reading through articles even if I had to ask my Mom or Dad what the words ment. At 8 years old I was hooked on baseball. I was growing up in Cleveland, OH and it was 1954 and the Indians were headed to the WS. There was a daily column in the Cleveland Press called 'Indian Items'. It was the first thing that I looked for when I heard the (afternoon) paper thud against the door! In my later years, 10-12, I became that paperboy on a bike deliverying those Cleveland Press editions to 50-60 homes everyday. I felt like I was on a mission!
Much like WOY I simply like the feel and heft of a newspaper. For years I ate breakfast out, in the same restaurant, and a lot of my enjoyment was taking my time, over breakfast, to read something insightful, odd, editorial, etc.
I've been in SoCal for almost 30 years now. When I first came here, and for many years after, the LA Times did great in-depth pieces on Sunday. They read like a novel and took almost as much time to read. Now, the staff is cut to the bone and most of what's written would have been regarded as filler or not even published in previous days.
I still usually pick up a Sunday Times----not for the stories but because the coupons in the paper are almost always worth more than the cost of the newspaper, and by a few bucks at least. However, I now have a couple of internet sites that deliver many of those same coupons to my computer and give me points for things like dining out, airline milage, hotel points and so on when I use them. I do have to wonder how much longer I will be picking up that Sunday L.A. Times.
Rem
Last edited by remdog; 12-10-2008 at 09:39 PM.
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