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Newspapers have been printing money for 100+ years, and if the market is now putting an end to that, such is life. Monday we came up with 9 one-line reason this kind of bailout is a terrible idea. Briefly, they were:
* It's bad to reward outdated businesses based on outdated tech.
* Newspapers delivery trucks don't run on water.
* Just because newspapers go away doesn't mean sources will.
* Newspapers employ just 0.2 percent of the nation’s labor force.
* 66% of people get their news from TV.
* Newspaper owners think Google is a parasite.
* Ask people when they last bought a paper, much less subscribed.
* A government subsidized "free press" isn't a "free press" at all.Here's a new one, for good measure:
* As newspapers go away, a shrinking supply of ad inventory will drive up ad prices, rewarding innovative new media.
Nobody’s ever really been able to explain to me why we have to have an either-or world. Surely there’s room for newspapers in the web age, particularly since online reading and traditional reading actually work two different parts of the brain…and if we lose our capacity to read longer, print-based sources, we are pretty much shooting ourselves in the foot, culturally….
I’m a danged spiffy netizen, but I also appreciate those precious morning moments with a cup of coffee and my good old-fashioned newspaper. Sometimes it’s not about knowing things first – sometimes it’s about slowing down and really savoring something, as opposed to blindly scrolling through it at the speed of light. The faster our culture gets, the more important it will be to make time to slow down, pause, reflect.
As for your comments about newspaper folk “only” comprising a tiny portion of the work force, well…I certainly hope you were being facetious. Any job loss is a tragedy, and it’s a touch callous to just tell people who have devoted their lives to something, “Deal with it and move on.” Unless we can exert ourselves to help the less technologically savvy move into the bright new computer age, we’re just being cruel and dismissive.
Your mileage may vary. Just sayin’.
Leigh Anne
I too love newspapers with my morning coffee. I gather quick online news updates during the day when I’m on the web, much as I do with radio television.
What concerns is the inability of online media to fund the kind of indepth reporting and quality writing that great newspapers provide. No one has figured out how online media can attract the budgets necessary to do this. Without printing, transportation and other related costs, it should be possible. But we are not there yet.
I think we’ll see more unprofitable newspapers fail, but the great ones will remain. They’ll continue to out-report, out-think and out-write not only online media, but TV as well.