Prickly City by Scott Stantis for February 26, 2020

It’s designed for the bottom of parrot cages, Winslow!

With articles such as this, small wonder.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/we-have-entered-the-trump-unbound-era—and-journalists-need-to-step-it-up/2020/02/21/66a3fc48-5425-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.html

I would love to have a newspaper with my morning coffee but that hasn’t been an option for over a decade.

Scott, it’s actually the Republicans who call all mainstream news “Fake News.”

It’s gotten to the point where they even attack FOX, because the station isn’t ENTIRELY given over to Trump sycophancy, but is actually occasionally critical.

I often wonder how many people decrying the scarcity of actual printed newspapers ever actually subscribed to them? I’m of an age, and still prefer my daily paper (which thankfully is still around). However, I’m a bit peeved at being told in the paper that I can “READ MORE IN OUR ELECTRONIC PAPER @ . . . .”

The newspapers need to be honest with themselves that electronic media just makes more sense for what they’re doing. And what a giant expense. I don’t know what it costs to print 600,000 copies of the New York Times every single day (and 1,000,000 on Sunday), but it must be astronomical.

I would have print by subscription only instead of distributing copies in every deli and stationery store (which ALSO must be an enormous expense). And include an online advertising SECTION, like in a print newspaper, for people who WANT to see ads. And you can charge a lot for those ads, since targeted ads get a very high response rate. And greatly expand local coverage, which is the one thing that’s hard of find on the internet. I would LOVE an online place where I can find out what’s going on in my own neighborhood.

Nobody gets it, Winslow!

For a number of years, I made the newspaper ads for a business with several locations (so they went in multiple newspapers), and got to watch them deal with shrinking readership by shrinking the actual paper. Two times in sixteen years, it was necessary to recalibrate our ads for the reduced column size.

And of course, they tossed comics (invariably the most popular things in the paper) right and left. “This ship is sinking! Quick—jettison the lifeboats!”

Suicide by bean-counter.

Technology can be very cold-blooded to the simpler parts of life we were used to.

I do miss the morning paper, but no digital ink on my fingers and no stacks of bits to recycle…

I suppose I’d be a killjoy if I pointed out Winslow (and Carmen) had noted the plight of shrinking newspaper circulation before this?

From a slightly different perspective, all newspapers had an editorial slant.

The Chicago Tribune was conservative, the Daily News was democratic/liberal, the Sun-Times, a tabloid, was a few steps up from the National Enquirer, “Underground” papers were anti-system.

They all had pernicious purviews of popular positions, and proselytized them in their publications.

Seems like the Wall Street Journal was the only mainstream publisher that never fell for the Russia Collusion narrative, or the Kavanaugh the rapist narrative, or the Ukraine extortion narrative. Repeatedly publishing falsehoods greatly damaged the minimal trust Americans had for newspapers.