Newspapers
Yes, I’m still alive.
In light of the Rocky Mountain News closing and a bit of their staff trying to launch indenver.com, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer closing and going to an online format, I’d like to state that I think they are following the wrong model. I do read most of my news online though BBC and the Guardian, for no particular reason, and I watch the Denver news. I couldn’t tell you what channel the local Wyoming news is on! Anyway, yes, news is online and more and more people are reading it through Google Reader and the like.
Who is going to pay to read the news online? I don’t think either of these sites is going to stay up for long. Even if indenver.com gets its 50,000 pledges to get started! Bloggers do have local news covered. I certainly won’t pay to read the news on Google Reader and don’t expect others to do so either. So the papers don’t get their ad revenue and subscriptions and close, putting the writers out of work. Who reports, then?
This is the problem I think most people are overlooking. We can get local news from bloggers and world news from BBC. Someone has to write those stories and no one will do that for free for long. Who would write war stories from the front lines for free? Writers quit writing, we lose all the news, not just local.
Now what?
About The Author
I’ve wondered about this for a couple of years now. I don’t read the newspaper; I don’t watch tv (for more reasons than Fox and MSNBC/CNN too); I get all I desire online.