The Day The Newspapers Shut Down Their Sites

Since when did people give a rat's tail about what a blogger has to say??

Who the hell are these people and who is paying them? I can sit here and blog until the cows come home, but it don't mean anything. So why should i give a rat's tail about some dude on Politico or Huffington Post or even the ESPN bloggers?

I never understood the fuss about all of this. Either you are reporting the news or you're not.

 

After the Journal, the largest paper to have a pay for play website is the one in Little Rock.
The circulation there is 160-170k a day and much larger on Sunday. I think 250k or so.
The paper is family owned and the publisher has written several articles as to why putting the paper for free on the internet is the worst idea in the world.
They are all searchable on the interwebs, but I'm too lazy to post links.
Interestingly, the LR paper has not had the radical drops in circulation that other places have had and it was big news when they laid off seven people in the newsroom last week.
The newsroom is still pushing 300 people total.
I think a proprietary reader for online content is the eventual solution.
Give me good content, a way to check and send e-mail, plus, maybe, the ability to look surf websites in a machine that is a couple hundred bucks and I'd spend the money to buy it and also but subscriptions to the magazines and papers that use the reader.

 

You guys are absolutely correct.

Especially irritating is when anonymous gripers to one of our online stories are taken seriously and (knee-jerk) reacted to by our management, but people who write (or e-mail) signed letters-to-the-editor get treated like an annoyance. If you've got a problem with something, let me know your name, and I'll be glad to respond.

Present company/forum excluded, of course.

But then again, this site isn't trying to be a newspaper.

 

So it begins...

http://blogs.wSportsJournalists.com/digits/2009/02/27/hearst-to-begin-charging-for-digital-news/