What's so great about daily print newspapers?

[Lake Hills Renter]

Wow, I had no idea such small towns have libraries. That's a good thing! And I think losing our papers makes us more of a world class city -- all the big cities are doing it. Full disclosure: I own an Xbox 360.

[Civil Servant]

[ira s]

I think it was Jon who said the lack of internet usage wasn't so much a class thing as an age thing, and I agree.
Most people in their 60's and older don't use the internet, so it doesn't really matter if there's a library on every corner with 25 internet terminals if people don't know how to get online.

Does having only one newspaper make Seattle less of a world class city?
Yes, if that newspaper is the Seattle Times. Not that there's anything World Class about the P-I...
I'm one of those people who is really rankled with the term " World Class".
A great city is one with diversity, racially, economically, and culturally, and that would range from opera to old grizzled guys in bars downing bottles of Mickey's Big mouth...but when I think of people who push the term " World Class' i think of people who want to rid the city of poor folks and folks less literate than themselves, and envision a city full of sculpture parks and opera and symphony and poetry readings, and people braying about native plants and how proud they are that plastic bags are going to be banned.
You can have your world class.

[deejayoh]

[The Tim]

[rose-colored-coolaid]

Pretty much what DJO said. First, you have to separate the two aspects of "newspaper's dying". One part is the elimination of print distribution, and the other is newspapers that stop publishing articles.

If every newspaper in the world immediately eliminated all print distribution, very few people would suffer much from lack of news. Even ignoring online news, cable TV provides 24-7 news, over-the-air TV provides a couple hours of local news a day, many radio stations are essentially 24-7 news and others like NPR produce regular news segments on under-reported topics. And don't forget that people talk to each other. I don't have to read every meaningful story, because people who are more interested in it than I am share it with me.

On the other hand, if all the papers truly shut down, we face a real threat of reduced variety of news. If there were only 3 papers in the country, it's easy to imagine a situation (like on TV) where one is ultra-left, one is ultra-right, and the paper that tries to use journalistic integrity is unable to actually cover everything that needs covering. Investigative report is especially time consuming and often the most important news we have.

Enough about the demise. In the future, most of all your biggest concerns will be eliminated by technology. E-paper, like what the Kindle and Sony Reader use will progress to the point where you can read a years worth of news stories on a single AA battery. Downloads will become seamless enough that even a disabled elderly will be comfortable with pushing the "Update News" button on his 'paper' (given to him by the Seattle Times of course, but with a 75 cents per diem charge) and within second he'll have the entire days news downloaded over the cell lines without even realizing that he knows how to use a computer (albeit a specialized one).

Think it's impossible? The elderly know how to use microwaves, and every microwave in production has little computers inside. What the 65+ crowd doesn't like are WIMPY computers with Windows interfaces that they find non-intuitive. This is obviously a problem that can/will be resolved.

[Ouch!]

Podcast between writers Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman. Partly focused on sports writing, but mostly what they feel about the reasons behind the "death" of newspapers.

[Lake Hills Renter]

Looks like we're not losing SREP after all:

[The Tim]

Lucky us.

[rose-colored-coolaid]