I’ve maintained a subscription to the deadtree edition of my local newspapers since I was old enough to pay my own bills. I’ve continued to subscribe even though the newspaper has grown less and less interesting, because I have found some things of value in it. But those things have steadily grown fewer and fewer, until all that is left are the comics. Oh, and newsprint does still come in handy when starting a fire.
That’s not worth the subscription price.
I’ve always read the paper for local news, not national. I don’t expect the newspaper to be broad in scope, but to focus on those things that others do not cover. It might still do this, but the news needs to be current as well as local. I have no desire to read the day after about an event that I would have attended if I had known about it the day before. I have no desire to read election results two days after the election, when the on-line edition of the same newspaper published those results the night of the election. I certainly have no desire to read last week’s baseball scores. Perhaps the newspaper is no longer printed locally and the press deadline is too early to allow printing current news. If that’s so, perhaps that was a bad decision. Perhaps one needs to abandon currency entirely and become a weekly opinion piece. Or abandon the pretense of being a news paper.
It didn’t have to be this way. But the choices y’all are making are driving your business into the ground.
Now where will my children learn to love the comics?
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