How many printed newspapers do you read daily? Which ones? Do you subscribe? Do you subscribe to out-of-town newspapers?
My preference: I love holding a newspaper in my hands. I can scan sections of a newspaper that I’m holding far faster and more thoroughly than I can by going to a newspaper’s Web site. Like the stories that hit after page 3A. I’d usually miss those unless I were searching the Web sites for a specific topic.
The future of newspapers was a hot topic today on CNN’s Media Matters:
HOWIE KURTZ: … is the outlook really as bleak as the critics suggest?
Joining me now here in Washington, Geneva Overholser. She is former editor of “The Des Moines Register” and now directs the University of Missouri School of Journalism’s Washington program.
Also with me, “Washington Post” associate editor Robert Kaiser. He is a former managing editor of the paper and co-author of “The News about the News.”
And Jim Warren joins us from the “Chicago Tribune,” where he serves as deputy managing editor.
Welcome.
Jim Warren, the “Chicago Tribune” just cut 28 editorial jobs. A lot of “Tribune” papers having to cut back. “The Baltimore Sun,” for example, closing two of its five foreign bureaus.
How exactly is this going to help the business attract more readers?
JIM WARREN, “CHICAGO TRIBUNE” MANAGING EDITOR: Well, I think, let’s stipulate, for starters, Howie, that in our industry we are facing an older, declining audience and fragmenting advertising for sure. Add to that the fact that I think traditionally, probably as a result of our success, we have been pretty smug, too hierarchical, very resistant to change, and have not invested wisely when it comes to marketing. … Read the transcript
It got kind of sad when Jim Warren suggested this:
… Even in Davenport, Iowa, as old Iowa resident Geneva may know, the “Quad City Times” is doing some fascinating things in trying to get a younger audience not only with a Web site but with a very small printed product that you can put into your pocket called “My Mom,” which is actually largely produced by kids. It’s an innovation that comes a little bit late, but I think it is a sign of the times, and which is why I am quite optimistic.
Maybe it’s a cooler product than he describes. So, do you hold a newspaper in your hands every day? How many? Thoughts?
the paper over coffee and breakfast. By the time I left Colorado though not much of the news I wanted to read was in the newspaper and a local freebie paper did a better job of covering the social scene. I still subscribe here but I seldom hold it in my hands. There isn’t any real news in it, it is all bullshit! I use it in the homemade low fire kiln and of course when we have puppies. I know it’s sad, but I only have so much time and so much gray matter to dedicate to news and I need the real news.
Spouse and I subscribe to the two local dailies — San Jose Mercury News and San Francisco Chronicle. Add to that the free Palo Alto Daily News (which gets distributed as far south as our fair city of Sunnyvale), some local weeklies (Palo Alto Weekly, Mountain View Voice, and Sunnyvale Sun), and assorted progressive freebee papers (Metro, which covers San Jose and environs, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian). Then there’s the occasional gay press paper we pick up when we can (Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco Bay Times) to keep up with what’s going on in the gay community (we’re “straight but not narrow” in this household).
I also love the feel of newsprint in my hands — and it’s hard to read a computer while eating cereal without causing a disaster. 😉 The spouse and I can be typically spotted at our local favorite eating place, both of us with faces buried in the local newspaper, occasionally interrupting the other’s reading with a “Listen to this, sweetie-babe…” 🙂 In fact, we have yet to read our Sunday newspapers; we’re taking them to Fresh Choice with us tonight…
Both our local papers (Merc News and Chronicle) are reportedly on the seller’s block — this also may effect the Daily News as Knight-Ridder (Merc News’ owner) bought out the local founders about a year ago. What I fear most is the loss of local news — with the Internet, it’s easy to keep track of what’s going on across the country or around the world, but there’s no equivalent source to keep us informed about what’s going on down the street or around the corner…and that has far more impact on our daily lives. I think I worry more about that than I do about conservative turns in the op-ed pages, which is also a danger…
Quick! Where’s your recycling bin?!
I’d kill to get the NYTimes delivered on my doorstep daily.
Spouse loves reading all the papers, but he’s slow — so they tend to pile up till I nag him to get them down to the bin… 🙁
Something to consider about the NYTimes Sunday edition alone-it takes a 100 acres of trees just to be able to print their Sunday paper.
I used to love getting the LA Times Sunday paper and reading it for the large book review/cultural arts sections and then work my way back to more hard news.
I lived with a male friend for some time(platonically as he happened to be gay)and this was the highlight of our week. We’d spend half the day laying around drinking coffee and taking turns with the various sections of the paper..and fighting over who got the book review section first.
The only time I usually get a paper now is when my sister and I decided we want to go to a movie in Bakersfield and have to get the paper for theaters and show times.
No more. Used to get two, but one is a major regional paper now available online, and the other local paper’s “news” shifted almost entirely to either AP stories, or fluff pieces. The smaller papers can survive, but don’t spend the money for local investigative, and/or original content.
Our local paper also used “stand-ins” for their editorial page, and became somewhat of a “clique” rag for the powers-that-were in our county. (Among other failures, the paper backed a huge, poorly planned, high-cost, negative-revenue development that lost by 20 percent in a city referendum).
State and national issues get fair coverage in both the regional and national news (print) media, and blogs pick up the slack left by those editorial writers losing their jobs. Prime sources haven’t changed much, and the net provides access to most.
I’m pretty much down to the Sunday regional, national mags, and blogs. Kinda like the democrats: they didn’t lose readership so much as give it away.
experience too….though some folks are still getting real newspapers in some areas of the country it appears. The Rocky Mountain News was still good in Colorado. Nothing really available here though other than papers putting out what you spelled out.
I usually go through a print edition of The South Florida Sun Sentinel and/or The Miami Herald everyday.
Fortunately, one is a Tribune paper and the other is Knight Ridder so the reporting style and emphasis is different between the two, even if ther stories are largely the same on any given day.
Every so often I will pick up a copy of the NYT, and on thjose rare occasions where I might be near a really goodnewsstand I might get a Guardian from London, A Herald Tribune from Paris, The Boston Globe or the Baltimore Sun or a LA Times or San Fran Chronicle from out west.
I like the feel of a newspaper in my hands too, but I’m all in favor of conserving trees by using less paper products. And of course, given the incredibly shabby stste of mainstream print journalism in general, one doesn’t lose out much by missing these print editions. I still can get more verifiable, accurate info on the internet in an hour than I can get from any ten newspapers that it might take all day to peruse.
I used to read every day the NYT until 2000 when I realized that they were leaning towards Bush. Since then I stoped buying it.
Nowadays I don’t even go tho their web sites anymore.
The only exception is Pagina 12 from Argentina (who else would tell you about The Hackademy),and The Guardian.
What can I say, sost faith in the MSM, specially the newspapers. But, I alwasys loved reading papers.
I read the Buenos Aires Herald every once in a while. I used to spend a lot of time in Argentina and read La Nacion also, back when my Spanish was better. (I don’t remember Pagina 12 though.)
It is the best paper there right now.The BA hearald is great. Lots of respedct for that paper, specially for Cox
As for La Nacion, don’t like it. It represents the upper class newspaper (although I have read it in the past). Pagina 12 beggan in 88(?) Later is merged with Clarin. People like Horacio Verbintski (founder of CELS [Centro de estudios Legales y Sociales]) , Irina Hauser and Victoria Ginzburg write there.
Yes! I couldn’t remember the name Clarin, but I read it also.
I remember during the early years of the Alfonsin presidency Clarin was tough on him while extolling the virturesof Saul Ubaldini the labor guy. (I actually thought Ubaldini was doing a nasty job of sabotaging any chance for working people to have an opportunity to restructure the economic divisions in society and in doing so begin the climb out of poverty, but then of course alfonsin, even if he did mean well, was hopelesslyoutmatched by the pseudo-aristocratic ruingclas who wanted the poor to stay poor at all costs. Then of course there were the Peronistas, the governor of BA province (Duhalde??), and all kinds of other nefarious swindlers and crooks, and each group had it’s preferred newspaper propping them up.
I have no idea exactly how things are going now internallyin Argentina. I know there’s been “growth” economically recently, but I’ve been out of touch with how things are on the ground. Is Kirchner going to be able to get things done oris he in for a scandal that will drive him out?
He seems to a really down to earth guy. In recent elections he won a majority in Congress. Politicaly he is doing everything he is supposed to.
But you know how it is with scandals… you only find out when it is too late
Personally, I thank the gods of RSS and i use Blam RSS Reader to go through and skim all the major news of the day. I’ve got an assortment of political, environmental, and feminist feeds that I go through. It’s incredibly fast and easy to skim through them all.
It probably takes about 10 minutes to go through what would have taken me half a day reading traditional newsprint. Since I’m a reading addict (non fiction, classics, comtemporary, and fantasy) that ‘s very nice since it let’s me get onto where my real interests lay as fast as possible.
Whereas I take the Fort Worth Star-Telegram daily and read the Dallas Morning News. Mostly, though, I try to get state and local news from them (and the comics – nothing replaces the daily comics held in your hand on paper. That’s the only reason I get the Dallas paper anymore since they bawdlerized the editorial page in an attempt to be more blog-like.)
There are about 22,000,000 people in Texas, almost as many as all Canada, and there is very little published news that focuses on the state as a whole. Everything is either local or national.
Newspapers used to perform a vital function in our society. Ya know the fifth estate etc. no more now they are captive organs of the corporate state, at least the large ones, and no longer can be relied upon to speak truth to the people.
They are dying because their owners think they are businesses existing for profit and run them so.
Can you imagine what Benjamin Franklin would have said about the NYT, Judy Miller or the WaPo’s Harrison?
They better get their heads out before it is too damn late.
The other problem is that most of the big city newspapers have bought up and closed down their rivals so that they are monopoly papers in each city. The results is no competition to spur invistigative journalism.
In fact, for big projects the papers usually have a financial stake in getting them going, so they would damage their own revenue if they investigated the local projects. The Dallas Trinity River Initiative is an example. The Dallas Morning News is a cheerleader for the project and they are selling the prestige of the grand redesign of a major undeveloped part of Dallas (the trinity river banks), so you know they won’t investigate it. Before they bought and shut down the Dallas Times Herald in the early 90’s, one paper would be a booster because its advertisers were involved, and the other would be free to investigate. No more.
We have the NYTimes delivered daily, and one of our two local papers, the Detroit Free Press. But the Free Press, a long-time Knight-Ridder pub, was recently bought by Gannett, which does not bode well for its content. We had already seen profit margins raised locally by K-R, with a long-term terrible newspaper strike, layoffs of many salaried reporters, and widespread use of stringers. A series of three outstanding publishers/editors have retired in recent years, followed by a shrinking of the paper. We expect this trend to accelerate with the Gannett purchase and the early signs are that we are right.
Our experience in Iowa with Gannett owning our local, regional, and state newspapers was that we had papers with virtually the same content with only slight differences in terms of local “human interest” stories, and a great deal of overlap with USA today.
I don’t look forward to that here. The lack of in-depth reporting is appalling, particularly in a city and state rife with cronyism, racism, and an entrenched political machine. We are also tired of reading an article in the NYT, only to see either the same article re-treaded a few days later in the local paper, or to see a local article on the exact topic, done in shallow but clearly imitative form.
We find ourselves eating breakfast at our computers, newspapers in hand, but also checking out the Toledo Blade (best paper in the region and great at investigative reporting), San Jose Mercury, WaPO, Google News on my favorite topics, the Guardian, etc.
It’s a long way from the day when my sister and I fought over who would get to the morning and evening paper first.
I live in Fairfax, VA (not the South, just ‘occupied territory)) and subscribe to and have delivered daily the Washington Post. (Using the Clint Eastwood voice, while pressing a rolled-up newspaper into someone’s back: “This is the Washington Post – the most powerful newpaper in the world. It’ll blow your head CLEAN OFF.” (or something to that effect).
I don’t personally read all of it every day except the editorial pages, except weekends. My wife does: every word of every article, including the ‘Car Pages’ and the Sports section,daily. What she wants to know about the Lexus LX-whatever or the new Chevrolet Subdivision — or the fate of some obscure Eastern college’s lacrosse team — is totally beyond me. But I always have a resource to ask if needed.
In addition, though, I daily read the offerings of at least six to eight other newspapers online, not including a bunch of weblogs.
But there’s nothing like making a mimosa for yourself and your wife, and laying in the bed on weekends, reading the actual newspaper, and commenting on and arguing about what you read.
I can remember reading daily newspapers in Minnesota, when I was about 5. Every morning before school, I’d read the morning paper (after my dad was done with it — he left for work earlier), while having breakfast and looking at the ‘Today’ show with Hugh Downs…
I obviously didn’t understand all that was in the paper, but the idea that you got this thing with NEW STORIES delivered every single day was pretty exciting.
All the places we’ve ever lived (except Switzerland and Buenos Aires) we’ve had daily papers delivered. In those places, we just had to buy the expensive English editions sold, like the International Herald Tribune.
There really is nothing like holding and reading a real paper while having your morning coffee, and I can’t really imagine any sort of text/reader device which could or would replace this experience. But I’m willing to try one, if one comes out…
I don’t subscribe to any print newspapers right now. I have, off and on, subscribed to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, my hometown paper, but it has been almost worthless for a number of years so I let it slide. It was, however, recently bought from the Pulitzer family and it SEEMS to be getting better (from what I can tell from the website).
I generally buy the Sunday NYTimes and spend the day reading it. I love the feel of a real newspaper with real stories (no matter how ticked off I get at the Times). The biggest problem for me is that I’m not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination so there is no way I want get up earlier just to read the newspaper in the morning, especially if all the news in it is the same thing I heard on the late TV news the night before without any extra added benefit like in-depth reporting or good news analysis.
I WOULD read one, if there was one that wasn’t a complete, fluffbrain spin rag.
Fuggedaboudit.
The whole MSM is SO over.
Corporate special interests rule the airwaves and the presses.
Long live the internet.
And watch out.
They’re no dummies.
We’re next.
If we let them.
AG
Once upon a time, when I still lived behind the Orange Curtain (or The OC as it is now known I guess) I’d read through the OC Register and LA Times front sections and sports sections. We got the Tribune while living in Columbia, MO. I gave up on print newspapers here in the OK panhandle, in large part because I didn’t want to support the nuts who run the Daily Oklahoman. I get my local news via gossip, and the rest I pick up from the blogs and online media (especially The Guardian and Independent).
Ahhh… the good old newspaper. I used to work the night shift years ago and loved to spread out the paper around 3am when I ate my lunch.
But these days newspapers are in a real crunch. In the past, their competition was the evening (and afternoon) news. So if you missed the extremely brief (30 minutes) wrap-up at a certain time or wanted something more in-depth, you always had your paper.
Nowadays if anything is going on that’s “breaking”, you can turn on a television (quite often even if you’re at work) and see it fresh. Newspaper stories always lag behind everything else since they’re wrapped by 10pm the night before they’re even delivered.
So newspaper can’t keep up with what’s fresh or short. And people wanting longer analysis switch on their computers when they get home. So there’s little “middle ground” for newspapers to hold onto.
Are there still some great papers in this world? Yes I’d say so, and many of them are in Europe. I wish I could mail all of you a copy of El Pais (Spain). It’s relatively small yet easy to read, and has well-written original articles (not just wire reports) and starts on the front page with major stories and by the last page you’re reading about art and book reviews.
Le Monde is also quite good, so is Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. And Corriere della Sera isn’t bad either. When you compare those papers to the kind of crud most Americans are restricted to, it blows your mind.
Pax
I subscribe to the Concord (NH) Monitor, having cancelled my subscription to the Foster’s Daily Democrat (not) out of Dover NH because their editorial policy was dreadful. The monitor is the paper for the capital area and is fairly liberal.
I like reading a newspaper at breakfast, (Foster’s was also an afternoon paper) and mostly I like reading the letters to the editor and the local news. I know I can read it on line, but it is later in the day by the time it gets up. I also like supporting the paper. It is more expensive than Foster’s, but so far worth the money.
I glance at the headlines as I pass the paper-box on my way to the garage, or in the grocery store. That’s about it. I get too annoyed at the news coverage to buy a paper nowadays. And back when I had it delivered the things would pile up and pile up, unread, until taking them down to the recycle bin on the garage level (I live in a high-rise) was a real pain.
So I much prefer reading them online, where I can read a variety of newspapers if I want to (when I can stand to read ’em at all), without all of them collecting in my living room. The blogs hit all the big stories pretty well, and don’t take up any physical space.