Newspapers going broke

[PatInTheHat]

What's a newspaper?

Newspapers are becoming obsolete quickly and in my opinion they deserve to be obsolete. There will always be news, but this format was never really a good one.

But you have to understand, back in the "good 'ol days" when Franklin was cranking out Daily Planet's, apples were uhhh...apples.
Consequently, it took them a way bunch longer to download stuff and other newspapery junk.
Ahh the future...who knew!!?
Well, come to think on it, I guess history does give us Johnny Appleseed!
A true visionary to the future of that moldy 'ol fourth estate, a little known fact that should now be widely excepted throughout journalism.
If only they'd have listened!

(Hey, any closet Johnny Appleseed fans out there? You know who you are!
You should stop by Fort Wayne Indiana if your ever close by, and visit his grave.
They have a Johnny A. Fesitval I've been to too...Yeah, I know, just a wee bit of that little green apple in the summer time jealous now ain'tcha?)

[Deavlynn]

Hi,

I agree, electronic transmission is definitely the way to go forward for the newspapers IMO.

They should be thinking of being available on the Kindle, Nintendo DS and any other devices that become available. Although how they fund their operation beats me.

I recommend bbc.co.uk/news for unbiased news from an organisation independent of advertising revenue.

Long days and pleasant nights

As for the funding part, I think it's really quite simple - they should go the way that online television is going - offer two models. Give one away for free and pack it full of ads. Also, offer a subscription model that is ad-free but has a reasonable cost associated with it.

If I want to watch a movie for free, I watch it on hulu, but I realize that I have a limited choice of movies and I have to put up with commercial breaks. If I want to be uninterrupted, I rent/buy it from itunes.

Newspapers need to realize that they have a large audience and they need multiple approaches. If I owned a paper, I would be hiring the best possible tech people and watching what they did in their every day lives. If twitter is the current thing, I would be getting them to work on putting our paper all over it. The key to it is keeping up with the newest, hottest stuff which is always a challenge with the net.

[tillyn]

Sign of the times, internet , who needs a paper? (i get our local one and enjoy reading it. Although it is available on the net.)

[Patricia A]

I for one am going to miss the Seattle Post Intelligencer who's last copy came out this week. Seattle is now a one newspaper town and that's sad. I don't care for the Seattle Times as it seems to cater to a more... how would one say... conservative readership.
The PI still has a website so all is not lost but it seems weird to not have my paper sitting in the driveway in the morning.
I'm going to miss Pearls Before Swine too, one of my favorite comic strips. I'm just a Dinosaur I suppose.

[phidgt]

It is unfortunate that the newspaper industry appears to be on the verge of extinction. We just lost the Rocky Mountain News here in Colorado. However, they only have themselves to blame. Why isn't the Rocky Mountain News still available online? One reason would be that they lacked adaptability. A lot of these papers are old publications and so stuck in their ways that they never looked at the Internets as a viable way to run a paper. The Christian Science Monitor is a good example of a paper that realized where the future was going. They stopped publishing their print paper and have a wonderful site on the web.

I can't remember the last time I read an actual newspaper. Yet, I read the news from at least a dozen different outlets daily on my computer. I will miss newspapers in the winter, however. The make for good fire starting in my wood stove.