The death of the newspaper......

[Bonny]

When we returned back to the SF Bay Area I signed up for Sunday only version. About three months ago I cancelled after they failed to deliver the paper before noon 3x in four weeks. I think we got no newspaper two of those times.

I really miss the physical paper especially the travel section. I used to also like the gardening but they combined that with the food section and now it's one bad section.

I meant get around to subscribing to our town paper which is actually owned by a San Jose based group. I just found out that the editor got laid off after working there for 27 years.

[Deleted]

DH and I are also holdouts although at our age we're not their preferred demographic.  They've done some annoying things including no longer giving credits for vacation holds, tacking on extra charges for expanded access to the on-line version (mandatory charge even though we don't use it) and thinning down a lot.  When we strip out all the ads from the Sunday version there's not much left. 

We still subscribe because we like the physical paper and they do good investigative pieces- not often, but it appears they're always working on one or two.  They did a brilliant "reverse engineering" study from a publicly-available database of medical malpractice cases which didn't provide the doctors' names but did provide dates and locations, and matched that against court records and named and shamed doctors who were practicing in the area after having licenses revoked elsewhere.  (As a result the malpractice database was yanked from public access for awhile and when I needed it for malpractice pricing work in my business a couple of years later, I had to promise not to match it with personally-identifiable information elsewhere.)  That type of journalism takes time and money.

ETA: Both Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos have invested in newspapers in recent years. Interesting.

[Shooby]

People are still reading as much or more news than ever. Online or TV. And, now we can get to read about news as it's happening and even see it live so why wouldn't newspapers fall away?

[Deleted]

Dec 22, 2014 8:00:31 GMT -5 Shooby said:

People are still reading as much or more news than ever. Online or TV. And, now we can get to read about news as it's happening and even see it live so why wouldn't newspapers fall away?

I haven't found the equivalent of investigative journalism on-line. I agree that up-to-the-minute is great, especially when it's breaking news, but so much stuff is just content regurgitated from elsewhere. You do a search on something and every "article" has the exact same details and no more.

I also get really annoyed at the intrusive ads on-line.  Pop-ups, pop-unders, banners on the sides, ads you have to scroll through to get to the rest of the article, stories spread out on 4 pages so you get more ads... I'm pretty good at ignoring ads but I still have to work around them.  They also do a lot on video (with commercials you have to watch, at least in part, first) and I have no patience for watching videos.  I want to read it.

[Shooby]

Yes, I don't care for videos either. But, the world is changing. We don't have any shoe cobblers or buggy makers either (well, except here in the Amish Community). Times change and things change. I like the internet and the availability of getting breaking news at it happens on TV or online. And, it was much easier for newspapers to slant their journalism without any rebuttal or alternative as well.

[resolution]

I am allergic to newsprint, so switching to online news resulted in a huge improvement to my quality of life. My parents still get the newspaper, so when I visit them I just stay on the other side of the house until they are done reading it.