The death of a newspaper

One of my favorite things to do in the morning, is to read our local paper, The Press Democrat, over a cup of coffee. I've noticed over the past year that the morning paper is getting thinner and thinner. On Mondays it has gone from 4 sections to just 2. It's really become a bit of a joke.

I have a friend who is a journalist for The Press Democrat, and she said that readership is down, all the newpapers around the country are struggling and being shut down. She told me that staff writers are being laid off, and that it's really just a matter of time before our local paper folds (by the way, it's owned by the New York Times).

She said that the paper is slowly being replaced by the internet. The funny things is that those same articles are being written by the same journalist that work for the newspaper. So when the newspaper folds, and lets those journalists go, who's going to write the articles. The internet is a very funny thing. Unless you have an advertiser, you don't make money writing for the internet. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for news organizations, and see how they adabpt to our rapid change in technology.

I have to admit that I only read about 30% of the newspaper, and that most of it gets chucked into the recycle bin. It's a terrible waste of resources. There is a free internet radio station I listen to called Pandora (www.pandora.com) If you haven't listened to it, you should check it out. It asks you few questions about the music you like to listen to, then creates a play list for you. As you listen to it, you can check a box whether or not you like certain songs it plays. The more you listen to it, the better it gets at predicting what kinds of music you like to listen to. Internet new should do the same thing. Instead of getting 200 pages of information that goes into the garbage, you could just download the article s that are of interest to you.

I'm going to miss our local paper when it dies. Having a cup of coffee and surfing the internet just isn't the same as reading the paper.