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Higher Price, smaller paper, no delivery

An over-simplified analogy:

I'd prefer to get news from Huntley-Brinkley, Cronkite, or Jennings every evening, than from Ted Baxter. Journalists are a light year away from "influencers, tik-tok copiers, and news readers".

An ongoing worry of mine: when the majority of people get news from algorithms and influencers, who overload people with 24/7 notifications - we often turn off thinking and turn on glazed-eye scrolling.

OK - back to my cave.
 
I agree with you, absolutely. Every person has a bias, be they a journalist, an influencer, or just me on a forum.

The net result of less people subscribing to papers is less “feet on the street”, ie reporters. With less reporters, papers rely more on common purchased content, like Reuters, AP, and probably sources like BBC, etc.

I subscribe not because I believe what I read, but rather I believe that humans at the site provide more value than parroting hearsay. “Go to Gemba”, as we say in the factory. I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal in hopes of keeping its 2000 reporters on the street, feeding me information.

Whether I believe said information is a second question that I take very seriously! (I don’t endorse the WSJ or think it’s the best/worst; it works for me. And on a dollar per reporter basis, it’s a good deal. The Chicago Tribune, mentioned by Maynard above has between 75 and 80, a lot for a regional paper in today’s news market.)
I subscribed mainly just to get a feel for what’s going on in my local community. Our local paper used to be very thick and robust with lots of good local stories and news items but lately it is just a few meager pages. A shadow of its former self. Sadly, I don’t see it getting any better in the future.
 
The lack of advertising (now on social media) combined with on-line news sites contributed.
 
I get The Economist weekly and read the daily online feeds for AP, Reuters, and Al Jazeera. Economist is expensive, but the others are about free. Too cheap to buy my local paper anymore. Lack of revenue from traditional sources has made the locals almost not worth reading. I learned to read using The Miami Herald, which landed on our lawn with a loud thunk.. My hosts during a recent 3 month medical exile in Miami got the Herald. It was OK, but the proverbial shadow of its former self. Definitely a fraction of former content.
Bob
 
Thanks Bob. I used to get Economist myself, 'til the price went so high. My daily online routine is CNN, Fox, The Times, Ha'aretz, al Jazeera, LeMonde, NZZ, Sydney Herald, Guardian, BBC, Reuters, and AP, and local news on TV. Sad to say my young friends all seem to just scroll through their news feeds' headlines, then forward them to all their contacts w/o reading the details.

But jeez, I really miss holding the paper and leafing through all the articles.

Tom M.
 
This is just my personal opinion from personal observations over the years - subscribing to established corporate-run newspapers doesn't guarantee that you are getting objective, unbiased news. That's my very strong opinion. I'm not saying don't subscribe (I do) but don't assume everything you read is objective. What worries me is when I see every paper and most of the mainstream networks using nearly identical language to propagate stories; almost as if they were all singing from a coordinated script. PS: Most papers and major networks also rely on advertising dollars.
Just saw this in another (sailing) forum:

"Kind of scary when the weather man is closest to telling the truth on the news."

Made me smile (and cry)! :LOL:
 
And, being a history buff I've read tons over the years covering events, big and small over the decades that have detailed how the world has become the place it has become. Another thing I inherited from my dad, but it provides a background to use to measure what is being reported and help determine exactly how true or not a story might be along with how much the reporter actually knows about what they're talking about when it comes to world and large national stories.
 
Mike - I think you and I share a couple genes. Your interest in history parallels mine - and my parents always discussed current events at the dinner table, with me and my brother. Newspapers, magazines, radio/tv, and our neighbors from various countries who worked in the local defense plants - all got us to think and dig for corroborating details.

We didn't have today's hand-held screens that throw stories and "cute puppy videos" at us 24/7 faster than people can digest.

Thanks.
Tom M.
 
I really don't see that the overall quality of the news has gone down, but I certainly miss more comprehensive local coverage. For most of my regional news I go tonthe website of Lawton's ABC affiliate. Their coverage is adequate, about what you expect from a mid sized city. For national and world news I like Deutsche Welle, the AP, Reuters, and NPR (although they seem less unbiased than they used to). CNN and Fox and others of their ilk are only good for opinion pieces.

Life was certainly easier when we weren't asked to use our critical thinking skills. We could simply digest what our friendly newsman told us and we didn't have to think for ourselves. Reading the news is no different than reading anything else, you need to critically evaluate what is put before you. Yellow journalism is nothing new, I don't know why we want to act like it is.
 
All news is biased in some form, now and back then due to the time constraints for presenting things and for creating stories. Now days there's more opinion and left/right that drives what's told, and how. So I try to hit multiple sources when I have time as well as my knowledge of how many things came to be what they are to understand a situation. I was probably the only kid in my school growing up who came home in the 60s, read the paper my dad got, which was as big as a today's Sunday edition BTW, as well as watched the local/nation news and read his Time magazine. I wasn't pushed to, just had that desire to want to know from my dad and my maternal grandmother who'd been a history teacher at Westerville Oh from the 40s till retiring the end of the 60s. My classmates, some of them at least, thought I was odd wanting to know how things were the way they were.
 
I really don't see that the overall quality of the news has gone down, but I certainly miss more comprehensive local coverage. For most of my regional news I go tonthe website of Lawton's ABC affiliate. Their coverage is adequate, about what you expect from a mid sized city. For national and world news I like Deutsche Welle, the AP, Reuters, and NPR (although they seem less unbiased than they used to). CNN and Fox and others of their ilk are only good for opinion pieces.

Life was certainly easier when we weren't asked to use our critical thinking skills. We could simply digest what our friendly newsman told us and we didn't have to think for ourselves. Reading the news is no different than reading anything else, you need to critically evaluate what is put before you. Yellow journalism is nothing new, I don't know why we want to act like it is.
Lawton has a TV station?
What's next,a stoplight?
 
Life was certainly easier when we weren't asked to use our critical thinking skills. We could simply digest what our friendly newsman told us and we didn't have to think for ourselves. Reading the news is no different than reading anything else, you need to critically evaluate what is put before you. Yellow journalism is nothing new, I don't know why we want to act like it is.
I have been pondering this and agree that yellow journalism is nothing new: "You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war" William Randolph Hearst. Likewise yes, the critical thinking skills bit - always required. However, things are different. Toronto had three dailies growing up (they all still exist) - The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and The Sun. Each had a very different slant on the news (still do). The Star was the more (small l) liberal, the Globe more (small c) conservative and the Sun was the tabloid. Back then there was a saying that:

If a ship sank

1. The Star would report on the captain letting children take his place in the lifeboat.
2. The Globe would report on the value of the cargo lost and
3. The Sun would report that the crew required the female passengers to have sex with them before they could enter the lifeboats.

What is new is that while we each gravitated to a perspective back then, people did not question the facts of any of the stories. What we didn't have was such a concerted attack on facts and indeed on the press. We didn't have such a polarized - even mainstream media and we especially didn't elevate the far fringe news sources as legitimate. And of course we didn't have an unchecked toxic Social Media presence tainting everything. Finally, with the rise of AI we are indeed in the last year or so where we can know that something was written by a human.

I am concerned, not just in media but in things like election interference (we are in the midst of a national election just now) that those who grew up in the era where those critical skills weren't needed do not have those skills now that they are needed. And, in some ways even worse are those so convinced of their own cleverness that they will not be duped. (I am convinced that the people most likely to be scammed are those who think they are to clever not to be scammed)

In 2017 at the Harold Innis lectures (University of Toronto) Journalist Andrew Coyne said this:

"The crisis of trust in the media is part of a much broader crisis: a crisis of trust in knowledge, in facts, in experts and expertise; a hostility, amongst a certain section of the population, to anyone who knows anything about anything. It is, as some have called it, an "epistemic crisis"; a significant section of the population has simply decided it knows what it knows, unreachable by any amount of evidence."

strange days indeed.
 
Thanks J-P. As we've said many times here, as people continue to casually - and often unthinkingly - scroll through their feeds, they're much less drawn to finding out details, and much more inclined to "share with all your contacts".

Bad times ahead.
 
Bad times ahead.
Not if you are capable of critical thinking and don't take any one source as gospel. But I just saw this somewhere else and it reminded me of this thread and how divided we have become. I had to laugh.

485766907_122152257938367025_5488324968445859172_n.jpg
 
And you have to have the attention span to go through the data and gain enough background knowledge to know if something is plausible or not. I grew up with most teachers being WW2 vets moving towards the end of their careers in the 60s/70s and most expected us to spend time and actually learn more than just what the state mandates required. So I always ask myself, for important things, can this really be true or what facts may have been left on the cutting table that might, change it a little or a lot.
 
And you have to have the attention span to go through the data and gain enough background knowledge to know if something is plausible or not. I grew up with most teachers being WW2 vets moving towards the end of their careers in the 60s/70s and most expected us to spend time and actually learn more than just what the state mandates required. So I always ask myself, for important things, can this really be true or what facts may have been left on the cutting table that might, change it a little or a lot.
Luckily I have a great attention…. SQUIRREL!!!🐿️
 
Speaking of my local paper, the Albuquerque Journal, I don't know if I posted about this before, but a few months back the Editor and VP of that paper was arrested for shoplifting (by "skip-scanning" items). Also, apparently his kids were involved the same night knocking over displays at this Walmart and stealing by drinking energy drinks without paying and leaving the empty cans on random shelves.

Before this happened, but within the past year, I had corresponded with this guy over what I felt was unbalanced coverage in the paper. I had expressed my opinion and concerns, based on my observations, that the paper seemed to lean a specific way on stories and would either report of not report facts of a story based on the paper's ideological bent. Of course he responded to me in defense of the paper and insisted they pride themselves on being objective and presenting all sides of a story. I guess his definition of objective differs from mine. Oh well, I've long accepted that the local paper of record didn't always report things or include facts I thought they should. Such is life. Anyway, this fellow (who perhaps should also take some parenting classes) is no longer associated with the Albuquerque Journal. To the paper's credit, they were very open and transparent about this incident.

 
When I went back to Eureka,CA,I bought the local paper.
It took a while to even find a place that sold it.It seemed to
only be about 8 pages or so.Not much there.
 
Our major paper decided to use USPS for delivery. Service is at best erratic. It come by the mail after it is delivered by a truck from the printing plant to the local post office. Mondays at very iffy. If there was Football, baseball, soccer of basketball late ending it probably will not be delivered as the delivery truck decided it is too early to get up and do his job. Also happens on weekdays. There are 12 national holidays per year so no Mail service and therefore no paper delivery. Contact the CORP people supposed in charge and NO RESPONSE. Contact the warehouse and answer there is We'll look into it.
 
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