You forgot to mention the price increases. As our daily paper has become thinner, they've charged more and more for it. For example, from Jan 2023 to Jan 2024, it increased on price by 60%.
I want to support local journalism. It is important to me and my community. But paying more to get less makes is hard.
I think in the past more advertising paid since your attention was also the product. Easier to got to FB now since you can measure ROI and reach way more people.
It does seem like the news industry is in a real bind.
Yes, I am paying $85 a month for a paper that publishes six days a week and never on holidays. There is almost zero investigative news. When the Dr. Larry Nassar story broke at Michigan State it took close to a week before it appeared. Grant you the counter culture weekly in Lansing published on it a day after the Indianapolis paper broke the original story.
I'm happy the price of my local weekly paper (about £2.50) for a town of about 10,000 (most of the paper is the wider county which has a 300k, the first 4 or 6 pages are specifically local)
Because if I (and the others that do pay) don't pay it for local news, then nobody will cover local news, and I value local news coverage far more than £2.50 a week.
Think of it as paying for a youtube channel on patreon.
The paper's back end systems must be a train wreck. We've got the opposite problem - bought a house where the previous occupant had a subscription and they can't seem to update the delivery. Every time it snows I have to find the paper before I snow blow the driveway. If we are ever gone, we end up with a pile of papers in our driveway. We've called, and can connect eventually to a human, which usually gets us a week of paused delivery. I wish I could rid myself of this litter.
Re:To all the newspapers I loved
by master-lincoln on Monday February 05, 2024 @08:19AM
(#39260935)
Could you sue them for littering your property as you have no business connection to them?
Maybe threatening this with a letter already helps
The newspaper will not take phone calls from subscribers. The customer 800 number routes you to India where you can hear roosters crowing whenever you call them. They always promise to send a 'strong letter' to the circulation manager but nothing ever changes.
The paper is a third the size it was in the seventies. I am close to cutting back to the digital equivalent which is a poorly formatted PDF :<(. The Detroit newspapers only publish 4 days a week. They stopped accepting letters to the editor. They couldn't be working any harder to drive people away.