The Demise of Newsprint

I subscribe to a print version of the Kansas City Star and it gets delivered to my driveway every day. My father did it all my life, and I kept it up without thinking about it much. The average age of the people in my neighborhood is older than me, and there is still a newspaper on every driveway in the morning.

Are we dinosaurs? I know that with the Internet, there is a world of news out there, freely available at the click of a button. I know that the gas to deliver the newspaper to me and the paper used to print the newspaper are not the best choices environmentally. I keep doing it mostly through habit, but there are some reasons why it's really nice to have a paper newspaper.

The chief reason is portability. I love having a paper when I fly on an airplane because you have to keep your laptop off and don't have an Internet connection in a plane anyway. Sometimes it's nice to take the paper out on the porch, over to the easy chair, or into the bathroom (sorry! but it's true). It's nice to pull out a pen or pencil and do the crossword puzzle.

You can also browse a newspaper better than an online article. When you want to know what's going on in the world, you have no idea what that might be, or you wouldn't need a newspaper. It's good to flip through and see if anything interests you. Online, someone is telling you what is important, and you're offered some of their choices of what you might need to know. One of my most annoying revelations was when I found out that the AOL newsfeed had the exact same headlines that the gossip mags have in the checkout line of the grocery store.

I do like the idea that the people that write for a newspaper are accountable for its content. I still don't feel that is true for the online alternatives. Do those people even check their facts, research sources, or worry about someone pointing out that they got it all wrong? Plus, the instantaneous nature of online access, along with what I usually see on the online news story feeds, leads me to believe that impatient shallow minded browsing is the norm for that form. If you want to know it in depth and take it all in, you're better off going for the print on paper.

I also like the size of a page and how you can take it all in at a glance in a newspaper, versus the annoying paging down you have to do on a computer screen. In a newspaper, you know what you're getting into as far as time commitment goes when you read an article. Often, online, I feel like it was completely truncated or surprisingly stretched out. And don't get me started on advertising. It's so much easier to ignore advertising that doesn't move on a printed page. I'll never get used to those stupid ads where something moves around or dances, continuously annoying me. You can't turn them off, either.

All that said, major and minor newspapers are failing, folding and leaving communities unserved in a sudden rush. This can't be a good thing. I would prefer if they transmorgrified into online versions rather than disappearing completely. I understand that the online alternatives of classified ads are one of the biggest factors robbing newspapers of their revenue. They should have seen this and come up with alternatives. If they had invested in a system that would have made selling or finding things locally more easy and convenient, and worked to make it make money without costing the buyers and sellers too much, it would have been an overwhelming success. I can think of dozens of ways to do this, lots of features I would build into the system if it was me.

They could also have had two tiers, free news and subscription news. With subscription news, you get to post comments (don't let any crazy kid with a computer spew nonsense onto comment pages - if you pay, you'll leave thoughtful comments that I would actually want to read), you get more content and sources, maybe even emails of the authors, and ability to pic pictures off the web. It's possible.

Whatever system we come up with and settle down to in the future, if it serves communities, provides timely and accurate content, and keeps us connected to the world, that's alright with me.