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Newspapers - a dying media?

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Mudcat

Mudcat

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I know the answer is yes and the reasons are obvious. But I have been reflecting on this since Saturday. I was at the grocery store and just inside the front entrance was a guy handing out free Toronto Stars.

The Toronto Star has been the biggest paper in this area for basically my whole life - and the Saturday edition is the big one with all the special sections/features and the TV magazine etc. Canada's version of the Sunday New York Times, I imagine.

Person after person was given this offer and in the time I was observing, I saw about 5 in a row politely decline. I declined. I was sure it would just end up on the recycling pile unopened and it seemed like a waste.



I have fond memories of once-upon-a-time settling in with a fresh Star as part of my Saturday routine, knowing I would be pleasantly occupied for an hour. Are newspapers going the way of the dodo? Should we weep for the newspaper?
 
I weep for the lack of good writers in our era's stable of print journalists. The San Francisco Chronicle is my local equivalent and it had been suffering from bad writing since the turn of the century before the shift away from print media forced it to downsize. Now it resembles a weekly urban tabloid paper, having abandoned the broadsheet format and many of the sections I had come to enjoy.

In my opinion, newspapers are all but dead, unless they reinvent themselves after the periodical model and staff only elite writers to cover the biggest and most impactful stories in extra depth. Something of a twice-weekly version of U.S. News & World Report, locally focused, and printed on newspaper is my vision for the future of the medium, if one remains. There is simply no need to sacrifice quality anymore to remain a daily production; the Internet and television serve as the only practical outlets for breaking news anyway.

I don't weep for the newspapers because the choice is theirs whether to evolve or go extinct. I didn't weep for the rotary printing press either when I bought my sweet new HP Officejet. History should be preserved while progress is championed, I say.
 
I get a Sunday paper every week. I get the Sun rather than the Star since I prefer its TV magazine. I just lightly skim the paper itself. It has some really funny sarcastic entertainment writers that I always make a point of checking out. I keep meaning to copy some of the stuff onto this forum to share the laughs.

The other day I drove a friend to have a medical procedure done so I knew I would be spending about an hour in a waiting room so I brought a paper. It was quite pleasant to sit there and read it.
 
The papers will re-invent themselves, with I-phone Apps that you pay a small fee for, and the free news sites that have a reputation will become pay for news. Still others will have investigative reporting like they used to have for shows like investigative reports, Nova, and frontline.
 
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