Posted on 08/13/2019 5:21:52 AM PDT by Kaslin
Many small time papers are going digital with a daily online version in addition to the print version. I see the print version disappearing within a decade.
Cable TV is next.
This report doesn’t seem to resemble any of the papers I’m familiar with.
That is the problem with our once weekly local paper, they report Left Wing crap at the local level. They went whole hog on supporting a Gravel Pit on a main road the town has a hard enough time keeping up. Half a dozen jobs or so. Never mind the fact 1 public and 1 private school are on this road. UPS, USPS use it heavily, it’s curvy, slow speed as a result 30-45 mph, damage to the road, tires, windshields, danger to the school buses and kids, or the resident stepping into the road to collect their mail.
We have tarp laws they’d ignore, or the gravel would bounce out of the holes in the trucks that hog the 2 lane road and go flying into windshields. They don’t want to pay to have fixed, no assurances they’d keep the road fixed. Got defeated on the ballot thankfully as enough citizens were intelligent enough to understand what a gravel pit and all those dump trucks would do to their cars and to the road.
Sensationalist headlines like this article are one reason reason people have bailed on print media.
The paper mill workers in Thunder Bay must be wondering about their future...
“Newspapers are the watchdogs who hold our civic institutions accountable and act as a cheerleader for the unique fabrics in our society,”
I agree, but they (newspapers) gave up doing that 80 years ago. They went from being a watchdog to a lapdog.
I am happy to see them all go away
I see the same problem with TV news here in Pittsburgh.
If somebody gets shot in a bad neighborhood, a low-lying neighborhood gets flooded out, or some school closes due to declining enrollment, they go out of their way contort that into some reason to bash Trump.
I agree that it is a problem in that nobody else has really picked up the ball to cover what your local school boards and town councils are up to.
Anybody can create a Facebook group. This group can be on any subject.
My small town has four or five groups.
One is for yard sales.
One if for local history
One if for complaints and items of community interest
Plus the fire and police department each have a group.
(I get weekly reports of fires and crime from them)
The city itself has a group where they post their meetings
Almost all the functions a newspaper performed for the local community is being covered.
And I don’t care if you don’t like facebook or have never signed on. That is your right. Good for you. I am happy for you. I will however ignore all your comments on how evil facebook is.
The ghosts of buggy whip makers are moaning in agreement.
Newsprint is a bit different than tissue...
gannett was bought by gatehouse last week . . . although the financing has gotten sketchy since they announced the deal.
Close.
Grand Rapids, Mi area.
Almost all of the papers in the southern lower peninsula were consolidated into the “MLive group” which keeps them all from folding by sharing resources (low quality local writers and wire copy), and otherwise producing the same newspaper with just a slightly different order to the local articles, and with a different name on top of the fold to fool older people into thinking they are getting a local paper like they did years ago.
I would not be shocked if the same thing happened in Indiana too!
Once the newspapers started hiring people from ‘journalism schools’ - which are filled with hate-filled Leftists - their days were numbered.
They asked for it.
Food recipes, Orange Man Bad, Why White People/Civilization Suck and yesterdays’s sport scores.
You're correct. Movies used to advertise showtimes. Online now. Auto dealers, online now. Employment, online now. Nobody checks the stocks in the paper, anymore. Additional problem in small towns is that advertising makes less difference. Everybody knows everybody, so either they'll do business with you or they won't. If Fred likes Tom, he'll get his gas at Tom's store. If Fred hates Tom, he'll use a half a tank of gas to avoid buying gas from Tom.
Also, nobody wants to be a reporter. Reporting is hard work. It's going through court records, attending mind-numbingly boring council meetings, and looking at things that some people would just as soon not be looked at.
Everyone wants to be an opinion columnist. Makes sense, cause you write a few "Dear Diary" paragraphs a week, and write the world according to me, and get a bigger name than the people who are reporters.
The last reporters anyone talked about were Woodstock and Birdbrain, and they were nothing but mouthpieces for the FBI to take out Nixon.
Not just Craigslist. Even before that, Greensheet, and a few other weekly "ad only" publications gutted a lot of the classifieds. Gotta admit, I miss the old personals. Two of my favorites: "Wanted to trade: Harley with wrecked front end for motorized wheelchair" and "Biker looking for old lady, real classy type, stretch marks OK."
Excellent point.
If I owned a paper I’d be hiring anybody BUT J-school grads to work for me.
They’d bring a refreshing real world perspective.
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