How often do you buy a newspaper?

For the purposes of this thread, Never.

Er, what if you subscribe to a newspaper?

Then you buy it every day innit.

I THINK YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT

I guess so, but it seems weird saying I "buy" it... Don't people subscribe to newspapers in the UK or the USA?

(x-post)

Not many

WHAT IF I GET A FREE NEWSPAPER PUSHED THRU ME LETTERBOX EVERY WEEK AGAINST MY WILL?

Oh, why are there always those paperboys in American films and comics then?

x-post

In the US yes, in the UK no, although one might order one for delivery by paper boy everyday it's not really a subscription.

So this poll is really for Britons only?

The difference being, in the US you ring up the newspaper to subscribe, in the UK, you do it through your local newsagent.

Seems an old fashioned thing to me. Still get paper boys I suppose.

http://www.fotosearch.com/comp/DGV/DGV051/775041.jpg

Not everyone subscribes. I would say most people buy at the news stand as required, in most countries.

My mum gets her Sunday newspapers from a van that comes round the estate

But it so much more handy when you subscribe... You can read the paper while you're having breakfast and don't have to walk out of your flat to get it.

(xx-post)

Who wants to read a newspaper every day tho! That's the point of the poll surely!

I though it was fairly common to read a newspaper every day. In here almost everyone does that.

you'd think you would know more about the world if you read the newspaper everyday

In where? BUY a newspaper then. (xp)

I read newpaper websites over breakfast. I'd get the weekend papers delivered if I was at home more than one weekend in three.

I don't need to buy it, I subscribe to it.

So you get it for nothing then?

No, but it's not generally called "buying". Do you "buy" your cable TV or Internet connection?

which box do i tick if my mum buys it and i read it?

I don't have a cable or internet connection. But, yes, you're buying it. (xp)

oh that's in the instructions! ignore that

Subscribe to the Waterloo Courier, occasionally buy a Des Moines Register ("yesterday's news tomorrow!"), a Trib, an Onion, the NYT or, if jonesing for boxscores & pie-charts, a USA Today. I've even cobbed a neighbor's WSJ -- they invariably pile up unread all over the yard and porch.

Any old newshounds still subscribe to more than one?

Yeah, but most people wouldn't say you "buy" your Internet connection every day.

(xxx-post)

Doesn't matter whether they say it or not, they're still buying it!

Tuomas your obstinate pedantry is breaking new ground. Can you not just accept that something subscribed to is bought and save us 100 junk posts?

I'm just wondering how often internet-savvy people actually buy (or subscribe to, or pay for in some way) a newspaper. I'm guessing not too much, which is bad news for the publishers, since from what I hear online editions currently make a loss.

I buy the Saturday Guardian for the review section. Apart from that, occasionally for a commute. But ten years ago I probably would have bought a paper most days.

Ditto

A few make money (guardian I think) but only if the paper edition is paying for the costs of newsgathering.

I'm guessing not too much, which is bad news for the publishers, since from what I hear online editions currently make a loss.

well if they're gonna sponsor the kids of their staff to sprout shite on their web editions about how they're shitting themselves about going to india, what do they fucking expect

<i>A few make money (guardian I think) but only if the paper edition is paying for the costs of newsgathering.</i>

Not the Guardian, if my source at the Guardian is correct.

Why has it taken so long for Max Gogarty to be mentioned?

"currently" = will do, forever. No newspaper website anywhere makes a) enough money to stand on its own, b) enough money to compensate for the loss of print.

is he the new nazi germany?

xpost

"currently" = will do, forever. No newspaper website anywhere makes a) enough money to stand on its own, b) enough money to compensate for the loss of print.

I wonder where this will leave us, though. Because surely print-edition daily newspapers will die out sometime in the next 10-20 years. Magazines may survive, freebie newspapers may survive, but I can't see paying newspapers surviving. Will newsgathering become totally centralised into some kind of Reuters style operation?

I don't know where it leaves us, but am pretty sure it spells the end for large newsrooms full of hacks. Change isn't always for the best.

(not that large newsrooms full of hacks deserve to stay around just because, but because newspapers generate the vast majority of our "news", and we'll be a poorer place without that, in all sorts of ways)

NYTimes: Sun, Mon, Wed, Fri, Sat

Newsday: Tue, Thu, occas Fri or Sun

there's an interesting article in the last issue of the new yorker about the wane of newspapers:

Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper

You got that right.

I agree with you! And I'm sorry you're going to be out of a job

heh, i'm not! i mean, i could probably stick in there for a good few years yet -- for some reason i seem to be regarded as quite good at what i do, and my yearly appraisal last month said i'm "highly motivated", which made me laugh for about 20 minutes -- but i'd really rather chop off my balls. it's a depressing, panicking industry almost entirely devoid of good ideas, and i just want out. so i'm back at university part-time doing something else, and if that doesn't work out ... well, i'll find something else to do.

I just hate to see people give up.

am i giving up? i guess i am, yes. but i feel that the damage began an awfully long time ago now -- long before i got into journalism (i've been a staff hack for 10 and a half years, and was freelancing as a student before that for another two or three), when newspapers failed to realise just how precarious their position was, and dismissed the internet as a little fad in which they could afford to invest next to nothing.

i blame myself for not paying more attention, too. shoulda realised which way the wind was blowing back before i graduated. either way: some of it's been fun. and, from a purely cynical/mercenary point of view, if i can continue to make money from journalism then i shall.

one thing, anyway -- to bring the thread back on topic -- i'm pretty sure i'll continue to buy a newspaper every day. will it continue to be the one i work for at the moment?

we shall see.

(by which i mean "heh, i'm not sorry ...")

roffles

roffling is all i can do to stay sane at work these days :/

i was generally roffling

yep, me too :)

It's interesting to see what has happened to the few aspects of the print media that have already been entirely superseded by the Internet. Classified ads are on their way to entirely migrating to the Web, and that field is now not dominated by any media corporation but by Craigslist which I think is non-profit-making. Then there are encyclopedias. I read somewhere that Encyclopedia Britannica recently printed its last ever paper encyclopedia, and has entirely migrated to the Net. The interesting thing being that it's Wikipedia that has gained the monopoly there, not Britannica. In both these areas, big media has failed to gain a foothold, and it's Web 2.0 non-profit outfits that have become the defaults. I wonder if something like this isn't eventually going to happen to newspapers, ie the Guardian et al. are actually wasting their resources pouring it into the Net, because ultimately some other Web 2.0 style revolution in news-gathering is going to sweep it all away, in the same way that Wikipedia one-upped Britannica.

Britannica really dropped the ball with their Fluxblog entry.

Yeah that's a good observation.

I think that may happen, except for some print papers that have charged really high fees for online access from the beginning like WSJ. Fox has different online strategies for WSJ and the NY Post, I guess for the different demographics.

Aside from display classifieds do papers charge a lot for garbage like those real estate and coupon inserts that always clutter up the subways?

xpost

real estate is one of the biggest money makers

Ironically, googling Britannica just now I came across
this (which actually looks quite interesting).

oh and maybe off topic but speaking of online strategies MLB are the masters of monopolizing content that one would think would be public domain newsworthy. They even sued some fantasy leagues for using "their" statistics.

by 2020 everyone will get all their news from their friends' Twitters

and a microblogging aggregate service will monitor them all to spot trends and auto-publish big stories to a wider audience

I actually got the WSJ until Murdoch took it over. It really is/was a good paper if you ignore the editorial page, but I couldn't stomach putting any money in NewsCorp's coffers.

I dunno, if you follow this line of reasoning the source will always be useful as a frame of reference.

Different news gatherers will always be granted different levels of access to the newsmakers and the byline will matter, unless either (1) the world leaders do twitters or (2) in the future all opinions are formed by sheer consensus (which judging by yelp and board function poll is not likely).

I find the WSJs coverage a lot less slanted than the NYTimes. It has a pleasing soullessness a la the Economist. Also the movie reviews are always right. Always.

xpost

I think the twitter/news aggregator might well be the kind of model that will emerge! We've already got news aggregators, but of course they rely on real actual newspapers for their content. So the problem looks like one of where to get the content. But Wikipedia has shown that it's a problem that can be solved. I note, too, that the BBC already goes in for some "Web 2.0" newsgathering techniques - on breaking stories on their website there's generally a box in which you can post text/images direct to the BBC if you happen to be near where the bomb exploded/earthquake happened etc.

Incidentaly how well are wire services doing right now?

Just reading on that Britannica blog I linked to above, the decline in newspaper readership actually started in 1984, ie well before the Internet.

Also WSJ (like Tribune Co.) spends the extra money to make the printing smudgeworth. Seriously, at least 50% of the reason I switched from the NYT was that I got tired of showing up at work looking like a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang extra.

xpost True that is good for unplanned phenomena where you don't need a press pass. Actually Wiki is a good place to get breaking news too.

Some interesting points made here. Newspapers are being "unbundled", and their constituent parts are migrating to the Net or elsewhere, ie classified ads = Craigslist, op-ed page = political blogs etc. But the really difficult thing will be to replicate in-depth investigative reporting in the Internet age.

^^^ this is basically my one note

also newspapers have a great ability to put stories that people aren't interested in front of them. A scandal about say dentistry is easy to hush up or blow over if only dentists read about it. If it's on the front page of a newspaper that everyone is reading, it has much more impact.

I think that's an interesting point. When I read a (paper version of a) newspaper, I do it in a much more passive way than if I look at it online. I won't read the whole thing, but I'll still end up reading stuff that I'm not necessarily interested but which may after all turn out to be interesting. Reading on the Internet seems to be quite different, much narrower. It's ironic how when we've now got a vast amount of stuff at our fingertips, we actually just end up skimming through the dozen things on Favourites or RSS feed.

Reading on the internet can be a bit like standing in one of those booths that blows the dollar bills around.

Serious question for the newsies: how much thought goes into the front-back (or obverse/reverse whatever you call it) layout in print newspapers? Is there a conscious advertorial policy there?

Because sometimes I can't tell which is the front of the clippings my mother sends me, Dear Abby: or recipe for pot roast in a jiffy.

xpost I am opposed to WiFi access in subways for that reason. It is good for society in general to shove broadsheets in people's faces where they have no other reading options. Wouldn't kill people to read a paper.

i can't really help felicity -- back page in uk is usually business or sport "front" page, rarely adverts

xp, somehow!

a man in a subaru puts one on my doorstep every morning (except one day he had a lexus instead)

but I'll still end up reading stuff that I'm not necessarily interested but which may after all turn out to be interesting

exactly, because dudes like me were taught that our job, when designing pages and writing headlines etc, was to try to make sure the reader stops and goes: "ooh, what's that? i have to read it." (i was taught exactly this; i hope i passed it on to stet, although i almost certainly forgot and he learned something better from someone else.)

yes, this model works to an extent with a list of headlines in, say, an RSS aggregator or on the front page of a site, but there's so much more goes into it on the printed page -- pictures, standfirsts, captions, pullquotes, the interplay between them -- and that's even before you get into the actual notion of design-as-impact, which is something that very few news websites manage to pull off (and very few newspapers, too, but fuck it: i've won awards for this kind of shit, and i rarely get to blow my own trumpet).

however: as i said above, it's all academic when the farmer decides to cull the dairy herd for cheap mince, eh?

how much thought goes into the front-back (or obverse/reverse whatever you call it) layout in print newspapers? Is there a conscious advertorial policy there?

not entirely sure what you mean: are you talking about what's on each side of any given single sheet? if so: none. usually. although stet: you remember your uma thurman page?

not entirely sure what you mean: are you talking about what's on each side of any given single sheet?

Yes. Thanks.

no: certainly not in the UK. the only time i've thought about it is if, say, i've got a cut-out coupon on the page (eg a bank mandate for a charity or something; had a few of those when i worked on our paper's saturday magazine (which, incidentally, is when i won the majority of the aforementioned awards: i'm a hasbeen these days)). i'd try to make sure it, heh, backed on to an advert rather than a feature, just so people weren't fucking up their mag :)

but then i think i cared more about that magazine than anybody else in the world, so i doubt anyone noticed, cared or thanked me :(

I notice! Thank you.

that means a lot! thank *you* :)

usually. although stet: you remember your uma thurman page?
Yeh, this rocked (she was slicing the page open with her kill bill katana, and you could see the page behind through. looked cooler than it sounds

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

For some the newspaper someone else is reading on the bus is always more interesting than the one you're reading

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

interesting. not as predictable as i imagined.

we're still DOOMED, but not quite as worthless as i thought.

wd be interested to know US/UK/other breakdown there, mind.

how many non-UK'ers voted?

I did. (A few times a year.)

US here. (never)

US here also, I voted 5-7 times a week, subscribe to NYTimes

US here. Several times / year.

it's not up to you, the reader, to decide whether or not the paper's there for you to buy. it's up to our bosses. and, to be honest, i think they think the writing's on the wall.

Is Vatche Panos your boss at the newspaper? He's not a very good boss.

do, uh.
why did the chicken cross the road?
to get the chinese newspaper.

do you get it???

neither do, i. i get the times.