Thread: NY Times Announces Digital Subscription Plan
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Old 03-20-2011, 06:12 AM   #27
snipenekkid
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wyndslash View Post
well, their (newspapers, in general) mistake was providing the news online for free in the first place (this is purely from an observer's point of view). my dad always wondered why they did that and wasn't surprised when we heard news of several newspaper publishers going under (these were the small ones, i believe). i guess people got used to it being free, and now that they're instituting paywalls, there are protests, not surprisingly.
then again newspapers were on the decline loooong before the web became a part of daily life. Our local paper, a town of about 18k-20k give or take, began to decline when they were bought out by a larger parent company, Gannette. First thing they did was fire all of the actual reporters, photographers, farm out the page layout and general editing then got rid of almost all of the paper routes for the kids in town. All the articles were simply AP news and whatever people dropped off at the paper for the coming events. And oh yeah, the Obits were still there as well as the daily police blotter with a list of who got arrested over the weekend. It truly disconnected from the town and very few folks I knew kept their subscriptions. Of course that started in the mid-80s.

So the newspapers are not without blame as they just were buying up small town papers, gutting them, then feeding people nothing but wire-service "news". Or was we called it "...yesterday's news next Thursday."

But this all backfired on them as the small papers have gone teats-up and helped drag the parent companies down with them. The web just was a last ditch effort by these companies to save themselves from their own greed. Yeah, I have an opinion about the news business. They might blame the web but by the time the web came around nobody wanted to pay for the news online because we were so alienated by the physical daily editions over the previous decade. Even the LA Times and San Jose Mercury turned into, well what they are now. Though I do read the LA Times online a bit more these days. I just prefer the writing in the NY Times is all. They seem to cover more topics I find interesting.
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