Sorry for my language but this is ridiculous! Thanks to a client’s tweet (on Twitter), he alerted me to this Reuter’s article posted yesterday. I can’t believe it!
A lawmaker, Frank Nicastro, in Connecticut wants their state government to rescue a couple local papers who are scheduled to be shutdown because their publisher, Journal Register, is being crushed by millions of dollars of debt.
Those newspapers aren’t the only ones in trouble but the demise of newspapers has been coming for years. It’s not just a 2008 issue. The Internet has put newspapers on the “endangered species” list … that and their exorbitant advertising costs.
Saying they need to be “saved” with a bailout is the same as saying that Smith-Corona typewriters should have been saved because they were replaced by computers.
The real estate industry has been moving away from newspapers for years! That’s not where buyers search for homes. Buyers use the Internet because it’s easier, there’s far more info on the home, and the photography … well the crappy off-register photos in the paper are just no match for the Internet. It’s just not the way to get a home sold anymore and having the real estate industry pull their advertising dollars out has had a significant impact on newspapers.
Real Living HER stopped running their large open house list in The Dispatch early in the decade. That open house list is now available on the RL web site. It’s so much easier for buyers to search for a given suburb or a specific price range on this web site. I frequently have open house guests carrying a print-out of the homes they plan to visit during the afternoon – printed from the RL list.
I went to Sat-Sun delivery of The Dispatch several years ago. This past year, I even dropped the weekend delivery. I didn’t like wasting trees. Way back in the early 80′s, The Dispatch was an afternoon paper. The news was pretty current with whatever happened earlier in the day, plus, I enjoyed reading after dinner when I had the time. Then they bought out the failed Citizen-Journal, which was a morning paper. Soon after the purchase, The Dispatch changed to a morning paper which I questioned because after all the CJ morning paper had already failed. So not only was the news old by the time it was delivered, but I didn’t have time in the morning to read it before leaving for work. By the evening when I did have time, it was really old news.
Then came the Internet and life hasn’t been the same since.
“Former Miami Herald Editor Tom Fiedler said that a democracy has an obligation to help preserve a free press.”
We DO have a “free press”. It’s called the Internet and all Americans are free to publish … just as I’m doing here. It’s a far more democratic and open system than restricting the news to what few biased editors decide we SHOULD read.
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Well written Elaine! I could not agree more!!!!
Brent, thanks for stopping by. Hope you’re doing well.
Yes, as we know here, much of our media – “news” – is controlled by one family who decides what we should know.
Elaine,
I stopped print advertising mid-way through 2008, and enjoyed the best second half of a year in a long time. An interesting coindidence? I think not.
Let’s see: Let’s have the government (meaning us, the taxpayers) pay to support the (failing) newspapers to be their watchdogs. Yep, that’s the ticket!
I’m with you. Are you kidding me?
Vance, I cut back substantially for 2008 as well, but still spent $1000. I can only track one response to that! What a waste of money.