Reasons I still read newspapers
Despite getting most of my news through the internet these days, I still get daily paper editions of the San Jose Mercury and the Wall Street Journal, plus Barrons on the weekend. At a get-together this past weekend, one of my neighbors who works at the Mercury took an informal poll to see who was reading newspapers versus online news sources. As might be expected in Palo Alto, a lot of people have mostly moved to online news aggregators. A few thoughts:
Some reasons I still get a print subscription:
- Habit: I like to read the paper with my breakfast and coffee, and don’t like having the notebook on the kitchen table while I’m eating.
- Faster scanning: part of the survivable value-added of news organizations is to assemble items that are interesting and/or relevant (”here, look at this”). I can make a quick scan of current news in the Mercury and WSJ faster than going through selected Bloglines subscriptions or Google News.
- Editorial and opinion pages. No shortage of commentary and opinion online, but syndicated writers usually don’t turn up online right away if at all, and in the paper they’re conveniently assembled onto a couple of pages.
- Overview of local issues in the Bay Area. It’s hard (not impossible) to generate a quick view of local news and feature articles; services like topix.net can generate local feeds, but they’re not great.
- Longer analysis and context for recent and upcoming news and events.
- Calendar of local events and activities. This is good for when you don’t know what you want to do. Once you are looking for something specific, online is much better (e.g. movie times, concert tickets, etc).
- I like looking through the full-page Fry’s Electronics ads in the Mercury. The weekly real estate section in the WSJ is often entertaining as well.
- Comics are easier and faster to read in the paper. However, there are a lot more choices online.
- They’re portable and don’t require batteries for a quick look while travelling.
- We never need to buy rubber bands.
I rarely if ever look at these sections:
- Financial quotes. If I want to know right now, I look online. If I’m researching, I want more info, which is also online. I still look through the weekly and quarterly summaries in Barrons, though.
- Sports section. I subscribe to RSS feeds on the Red Sox and anything else I’m following.
- Classified ads. Have pretty much moved to Craigslist, eBay, and other online services.
The future role of news organizations:
- Citizen-journalists, and just bloggers on the ground, are churning out vast quantities of raw content, with a wide range in quality and veracity. Along with the traditional role of putting reporters on the ground, taking notes, and asking questions, news organizations could help filter and highlight “user-contributed” news items along with commercial and advocacy-oriented news feeds, placing them in context with “professional media” news items. For breaking large-scale news, such as the London bombings last week, they can scan the raw data and build a composite picture of what’s going on. They can also clarify what’s unknown, what hasn’t been asked, to help influence the actions of people on the scene.
- I find that as I’ve been introducing people to news aggregators, I usually set them up with a “starter” set so it makes some sense, sort of like building a custom mini-newspaper of feeds I think they might find interesting. It would probably make sense for newspapers to start publishing collections of feeds in OPML or something similar, along with the RSS feeds that they’re starting to provide. This would make it easier for people to “subscribe” to the newspaper, and get an overall view of what the newspaper’s editors think is interesting, which is probably a better starting point for the average person than what they get now (usually nothing).
