Newspaper habits
I grew up in a household that had a regular newspaper habit. As I grew up, I kept it up. In college I also managed to get and read a paper of some kind, reading it over breakfast like I did growing up. After college, one of the first things we did when moving someplace new was start paper service. This continued until we moved to place where the newspaper was not delivered to my doorstep, rather to a box on a pole at the end of my driveway.
This killed my newspaper habit, but it took a while. The box-on-a-pole method of delivery is a result of where I live. I grew up in the inner city of Minneapolis, which like most midwestern cities was platted on a grid system. The same was true of our first post-college apartment, and where our first house was. Our current location is not on a grid, it's on the feeder/arterial system with no sidewalks.
Box-on-a-pole requires special clothing to retrieve the paper more than half of the year. This does not happen before breakfast. The doorstep delivery was simple, even when it was -15 outside. At that temperature, the paper-retrieval method of, "take deep breath, open door, grab paper, close door, let out breath," takes all of 3 seconds if done right, and even a mostly naked person won't risk frostbite. Box-on-a-pole requires a jog of many yards to get the paper, and that means environmental concerns loom large.
However, unlike most of my friends if I still had doorstep delivery I'd still be reading a newspaper. This is largely due to habit, a preference for the layout, and a desire to read my comics all in one page without all those blinking adverts, rather than a preference for the dead-tree version of my news.
Newspapers are dying out at a great rate, and it isn't due to box-on-a-pole in the suburbs (though I suspect it does have something to do with that). This is because the dead-tree version of news is anywhere from 4 to 24 hours of out date as compared to online versions of the same news, assuming an over-breakfast reading. For National and International sources there are much more frequently updated sources. For regional or state issues, there are typically local companies, typically TV newsrooms though ironically the largest newspapers also fall into this category, provide this information online as well. The one domain that the newspaper does have dominance is local coverage.
This is bad news for papers like the St. Cloud Times or the Alexandria Echo Press, as they have to compete for State coverage with papers like the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It has been suggested that these sorts of papers can survive by going "hyper-local," covering local issues to the greatest extent and leave national and international news to the online crowd. At the same time, publishing a dead-tree format newspaper is itself much more expensive than doing some form of ad-supported online presence from a distribution standpoint. Whether or not a news organization can survive on the online ad-stream of an expressly local news provider has yet to be proven, though.
The newspaper shares a problem with the big network newscasts, their consumers are still doing it mostly out of habit. Make a point of catching the CBS Evening News some time, and stick around for the commercials. The last time I did that, the top two products being pushed were luxury cars and medications. This suggests which demographic Nielson shows advertisers as the viewership of these news-shows. I know I stopped watching the big network newscasts when I stopped eating dinner every night with my parents.
I'm probably the last generation to consider these media types to be fully valid information vectors. Since smartphones can pull up cnn.com anywhere they have signal, you don't need to plonk down $.50 for a newspaper that's already very out of date. Or even watch the news.
This killed my newspaper habit, but it took a while. The box-on-a-pole method of delivery is a result of where I live. I grew up in the inner city of Minneapolis, which like most midwestern cities was platted on a grid system. The same was true of our first post-college apartment, and where our first house was. Our current location is not on a grid, it's on the feeder/arterial system with no sidewalks.
Box-on-a-pole requires special clothing to retrieve the paper more than half of the year. This does not happen before breakfast. The doorstep delivery was simple, even when it was -15 outside. At that temperature, the paper-retrieval method of, "take deep breath, open door, grab paper, close door, let out breath," takes all of 3 seconds if done right, and even a mostly naked person won't risk frostbite. Box-on-a-pole requires a jog of many yards to get the paper, and that means environmental concerns loom large.
However, unlike most of my friends if I still had doorstep delivery I'd still be reading a newspaper. This is largely due to habit, a preference for the layout, and a desire to read my comics all in one page without all those blinking adverts, rather than a preference for the dead-tree version of my news.
Newspapers are dying out at a great rate, and it isn't due to box-on-a-pole in the suburbs (though I suspect it does have something to do with that). This is because the dead-tree version of news is anywhere from 4 to 24 hours of out date as compared to online versions of the same news, assuming an over-breakfast reading. For National and International sources there are much more frequently updated sources. For regional or state issues, there are typically local companies, typically TV newsrooms though ironically the largest newspapers also fall into this category, provide this information online as well. The one domain that the newspaper does have dominance is local coverage.
This is bad news for papers like the St. Cloud Times or the Alexandria Echo Press, as they have to compete for State coverage with papers like the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It has been suggested that these sorts of papers can survive by going "hyper-local," covering local issues to the greatest extent and leave national and international news to the online crowd. At the same time, publishing a dead-tree format newspaper is itself much more expensive than doing some form of ad-supported online presence from a distribution standpoint. Whether or not a news organization can survive on the online ad-stream of an expressly local news provider has yet to be proven, though.
The newspaper shares a problem with the big network newscasts, their consumers are still doing it mostly out of habit. Make a point of catching the CBS Evening News some time, and stick around for the commercials. The last time I did that, the top two products being pushed were luxury cars and medications. This suggests which demographic Nielson shows advertisers as the viewership of these news-shows. I know I stopped watching the big network newscasts when I stopped eating dinner every night with my parents.
I'm probably the last generation to consider these media types to be fully valid information vectors. Since smartphones can pull up cnn.com anywhere they have signal, you don't need to plonk down $.50 for a newspaper that's already very out of date. Or even watch the news.
posted by Corwin at 9:10 AM
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