As a former newspaper guy, I hate seeing the decline and even demise of print media. Although I spend most of my days going online for news, retail shopping, even an occasional coupon “clipping” spree — I really miss a good daily newspaper.
But as my wife and I rustled through our newspaper at breakfast this morning, I was reminded once again that newspapers, like the U.S. Postal Service, seem to be on the way out. After reading some of the local news stories and looking over the reader’s letters in the “Opinion” section, we finished breakfast at our usual coffee shop and started putting the newspaper sections back together when I noticed an abundance of sale pages and a few discount coupons from local stores.
Unfortunately, the sale sections had almost nothing we were interested in shopping for, and the coupons were a waste of time. Let’s face it, local newspaper ad revenue is down because local merchants believe, rightly or wrongly, that their ad money is better spent on television, radio, and even Internet advertising. I don’t know whether that’s true, but the perception of that by the merchants is what’s killing newspapers.
Don’t know about you, but I’ll miss a local hold-in-my-hands-and-turn-the-pages newspaper when they’re gone. Which, at least from the appearance of our local paper, may not be too many years in the future.
I don’t really ever read the paper. Not ours anyway. There’s nothing interesting in ever. Other then shootings and killings and this and that. Who wants to read that?!