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Thursday, March 26, 2009

What's Black and White and RED all over?

The answer is newspapers.  The old riddle played on the homonyms red and read but unfortunately, newspapers are more in the red than read these days.  Increasingly, papers are suspending their print editions for online-only options, or printing fewer days per week in addition to taking other cost-cutting measures in futile attempts to survive the internet age.  Both The Washington Post and The New York Times reported bad news today:  The Post is slated to offer another round of voluntary buyouts--the fourth since 2003--and for the first time warned of the possibility of layoffs.  NYT staffers are have to take a pay cut.   Paper Cuts is aggregating news of the newspaper industry's demise on its site.   Commentators "of a certain age" are all over the place lamenting the fact that soon perhaps, there will be no more newspaper to linger over with a cup of coffee on Sunday mornings.  While I don't want newspapers to go the way of the dinosaur, I have to admit I'm not all broken up by the possibility.  When I worked at The Post there were stacks of newspapers available for free to employees every day--and I didn't read it then, having grown accustomed to getting my news online or via NPR!  Mostly I bought the paper on Sundays, when I was looking for a job, but then...along came Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, HotJobs, The Ladders, Indeed, et. al., so my fingers were hardly ever stained with ink.    A couple of proposals are being floated to save the industry, including making it nonprofit, like PBS and NPR.  What do you think?  Would you miss having a paper to have and to hold, filled with the news of the day?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I cancelled my subscription to them because their liberal bias became more than I could stomach. Even if only 35% of the country is "conservative" that still means they are turning off a huge number of potential subscribers.

MtnGrl said...

The Post has seemed a little more conservative to me in the past 5 years or so, since Katherine Graham died.

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