hierofalcon

Can Anything Save Newspapers?

There are certainly some cyclical problems - house and auto ads spring to mind.

The real problem is that someone sold a couple of big names on providing free content on the internet with the hope of some web based advertizing dollars. If not totally free, then just for the cost of an on-line registration. The advertizing dollars from the web barely pay for the web presence, let alone the journalists that provide the news that people come to the site to read. For most smaller papers, it doesn't even cover the web costs. Yet the content is there and is free for browsing any time any person wants to look, 24/7.

Unfortunately, I don't see much of a way out. Band together to abolish free content so you can get subscription fees coming in (either web based or print) and the anti monopoly people will be all over you. Leave everything free and only a couple major organizations will be left with no local news at all. Even with fee based web content, most of it will flow to major papers hurting smaller community papers.

As a middle aged person who works on a computer all day long, I can't imagine trying to read the news on a computer - headlines and an occasional article are fine from Google News, but for real news I much prefer the printed paper at night. As for TV news - bah! Sound bites R Us isn't real news. I want to be able to read what I want and skip what I want without having talking heads repeating the same story every 15 minutes.

The real question is how to make news relevant to the younger generation. We've lost a generation that cares about what happens around them. That they have the attention span of a gnat just aggravates the problem.

The internet without the journalism backing of print media and TV media isn't worth much as a news source. Yes, it's fun to blog - at times. But like it or not, the major journalism sources (whether TV based or print based) provide good content for the net. Lose that and you've lost a lot of value. If I'm looking for reliable information about some headline - I pick the names I know and trust and not joes-blogging-news-liv...

The trouble is that the major TV based sources (CNN and the like) are only focused on big events and don't really care about local news. Kill off print, as one poster suggested, and you lose much of what keeps a community bound together. You may rely on TV news, but it is in just as much trouble as print news. Local news is going away there too without some drastic changes. As more lawsuits crop up against web sites of independent bloggers or advertizers over what content they post, this may drastically change the landscape for the free world of the competition. There is value in that stodgy old editor that is only beginning to be seen by the do everything online crowd.

Many of the items mentioned by former insider are correct. I'm not as convinced the carrier interface is all that important. Getting the paper to me by the same time is important, but face contact really doesn't matter to me. I'm not particularly a union fan and I'm sure those rate high in the problems to be solved department.

As a newspaper stockholder, I wish I had better answers.

Nine Wyoming Stocks

WY is a great place to live. Course we do have high winds in the winter that only cease when it snows. The warm wind from the south keeps the state from being a deep freeze.

Compared to Colorado or most other big states, the traffic in WY is nonexistent. About the only problem areas are on I-25 south from Cheyenne, and I-80 going toward SLC. There's also a few other bottleneck spots on I-80. There's a couple of touches of congestion between Buffalo and Sheridan on I-90 at times. If you live most anywhere north of I-80 and ignore the Jackson/Yellowstone tourist spots, roads are open (allowing for occasional construction work areas). There aren't that many big rigs on the N/S routes, but I-80 and I-90 do get quite a few. Rush hours in some of the boom towns can be annoying and are getting worse, but they are nothing like Denver.

Sorry about Matthew Shepherd. No murder is good. The people involved were convicted with life sentences. But keep in mind that Mr. Shepherd's murder was one of only 11 in the entire state that year. Not a bad record overall. I think that the violent crime rate in San Francisco that year was about 2.7 x as high as our entire state. It isn't unheard of for San Francisco to have 10x that number of homicides in a year for just the one town. So don't let a single murder of one gay man paint an entire state as homophobic - okay? Even the people who are supposedly better adjusted don't get along that well.

Of the companies, I have owned Questar in the past and happen to own it now. The direction for NGas is the question, but it seems like its stock price is pretty decent and it seems pretty well managed. Some of the utilities listed don't seem to be very well liked, but what utility is in its service area?

Nine Wyoming Stocks

Neoconservative, well - lots do live here.

Anti-environmentalist - you're nuts - tourism is a big industry and the mineral industry vs. water pollution debates are intense.

Gun runners - not at all. But we do own a lot of guns and enjoy shooting them. On the other hand, murders happen infrequently enough in the state that each one makes front page news and the trial stays front page news for a long time. You folks in the big cities should consider that criminals tend to avoid places where they might get shot accurately by something big enough to take down an elk.

Radical wing nuts - Everyone is a radical about something. We just are radical about things you don't like.

Bigoted theologians - Having God in charge wouldn't be a bad thing, but sadly He's not. Yes, we have some bigots here. There's just so few people here in general that you hear about them more. But overall, we're pretty much a live and let live state.