Extra! Extra! The future of newspapers.

Slate ^ | Jan. 7, 2006 | Michael Kinsley

[reformedliberal]

Ours uses soy ink, now. That makes it less useful for cleaning windows or starting a fire in the wood stove. It was the kerosene-based ink that made papers good for those jobs.

I use microfiber cloths for windows and they are great, cost $1 each and are washable and reusable. Fire starter sticks are also cheap. Wood is our main heat source and I use about $10 worth of fire starters/year.

I can read the main stories in our little weekly on their web site. The free shopper is good for filling spaces in shipping box. Otherwise, we don't buy papers and can't think of many ways to use them. Maybe if we ever have puppies again......

[Leisler]

Hey, is that my letter to the editor in the upper right hand corner?

[HighWheeler]

Here's how well the New York Times is doing on Wall Street:

[bkepley]

Kind of sad. My ex just got a job at a newspaper. I'm not being funny. We're still good friends.

[capt. norm]

Bill Gates says that in technology things that are supposed to happen in less than five years usually take longer than expected

Bill Gates also once said that 64K was all the memory a user would need on a computer. (maybe it was 640K and I remembered incorrectly)

[q_an_a]

If MK got paid for this article he should refund the difference betweeen word count and value.

[albee]

An unstated reason for why newspapers are doomed lies squarely with the Eductional System.

Thanks to the "pass them at any cost" philosopy of school administrators, many of our kids simply can't read!

This does not bode well for the future of the NY Times or any other of the mainstream papers.

[Thermalseeker]

Now blogs are killing their news offerings and google will kill the rest of their advertising.

IMHO, all of that is helping to push newspapers aside, but I think the main reason is poor and or Liberal slanted reporting. Folks are starting to catch on that the major newspapers have a staunch Liberal agenda.

[Libloather]

Are leftists still printing on old growth paper?

[MississippiMasterpiece]

According to the latest census figures, only slightly more than half of U.S. households have a computer. I take this to mean that if the remaining households are interested in news, the only choices are newspapers, television or radio.

In my opinion, newspapers will always be with us. For years, my morning ritual is to read the morning newspaper over coffee and cigarettes, lingering on the box scores, crossword and local classifieds (Craigslist only lists 75 or 100 cities...obviously excluding practically all of smalltown America). I also read the obituaries, legal notices and comics.

I could give a rat's ass what Bill Gates or any writer from Slate postulates. The newspaper has been a primary information delivery system since the early days of the U.S. and will continue to be. The downsizing is only evidence that the large media companies are learning to operate more efficiently.

[Grampa Dave]

[Steel Wolf]

Extra! Extra! The future of newspapers.

As soon as I read this headline about the 'future of newspapers', I was immediately reminded of this exchange in Kill Bill 2.

Elle - "That's right. I killed your master. And now I'm gonna kill you, with your own sword, no less, which in the very immediate future, will become ... my sword."

Beatrix - "B!%@#, ... you don't have a future."

[beyond the sea]

necessary ping..........

Check out the pledge picture at the beginning of the thread.

;-)

That is a keeper.

[beyond the sea]

Never mind........... I see it disappeared.

It was the image of Brit Hume, CBS, Free Republic, and the forged documents with "credit where credit is due" under it.

Sorry............. but I think I remember that great picture came about because of one of your emails to Fox.

[madprof98]

I really need a newspaper in the morning, something to flip through as I have my coffee. But I don't need the Atlanta paper, much less the New York Times or even the Wall Street Journal, which are the only papers delivered here. If there were a national conservative paper, I think most people in our fairly affluent (and Republican) suburb would subscribe to it.

[Malesherbes]

My local fishwrapper carries stale news and liberal commentary. I stopped subscribing a long time ago and I do contribute some of the money I have saved to Free Republic.

[GOPJ]

And so, at last, there are two piles of paper: a short one of stuff to read, and a tall one of stuff to throw away. Unfortunately, many people are taking the logic of this process one step further. Instead of buying a paper in order to throw most of it away, they are not buying it in the first place.

I spoke to a young woman a few years back - before the bloggers came into their own - and asked why she didn't subscribe to a newspaper. This twenty-something's response was telling. She didn't subscribe because of guilt over throwing away that much paper (the environmentalist got to her in college), too much stuff she didn't want to read and the reality of the large quantity of garbage that had to be hauled out. Based on this sample of one, papers need to print smaller papers geared to specific age groups. A short "digest" of other age's groups news would be plenty...

[HighWheeler]

LOL!!

Can you put "FreeRepublic" on the wing of that buzzard?

[GOPJ]

... Based on this sample of one, papers need to print smaller papers geared to specific age groups. A short "digest" of other age's groups news would be plenty... (This is one suggestion of about 300 I [and other bloggers] could come up with...)

[Criminal Number 18F]

Try doing THAT with a blog!

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F