Why Your Home Phone And Newspapers May Be Similar
Today's Washington Post has a story about how the New York Times Company may be in the process of shutting down the Boston Globe, and Megan McCardle has a post over at her blog about Warren Buffet's response to a question about the lousy economic outlook for newspapers in general.
I'm someone who truly likes reading newspapers, so it pains me to refer to both stories. It may say more about my age and generation than anything else, but until last Friday I found it hard to understand how people could be abandoning both national and local papers in what seems to be steadily increasing numbers. To me, newspapers have always been indispensible.
But it all became clear to me last Friday when I got rid of my landline at home. For the first time in my life, I don't have a phone plugged in to the wall with an extension in every room.
Why did I do it? Cost was one, but hardly the major issue.
Instead, my Beautiful and Talented Wife (The BTW) and I realized that the landlines simply weren't providing us with the information we needed when we needed it. We were using our cell phones for everything. When we weren't home we were forwarding calls from our landline to our cells. The messages we received on voice mail seemed to bne behind the times when we had a chance to listen to it and we continually advised people to call us on our cells. We started listing our cells as our primary numbers. And our friends knew to call us using our cells instead of our home number.
In fact, in recent months most of the calls we got at home were from someone we didn't know trying to sell us something we didn't want to buy. So the BTW and I decided that it was time to end a half century relationship with our landline...and we haven't missed it at all.
This is also what's happenng with print newspapers. Many people who have always read newspapers are moving on to other sources, and readers who have never relied on the print edition see no reason to move in that direction now.
In other words, online news sources are to print pubications what cell phones are to landlines.
Sort of, but not quite
Well, there is the obvious difference that online news is pretty much free and so if you give up your paper, then you're getting news at no cost. On the other hand, cell phones are not free, so if you keep a cell and a landline but don't use the landline then you are paying double charges for phone service.
Aside from that, we cut our printed paper and I haven't noticed the difference...
Online news is free because
Online news is free because it is now subsidized by the dead tree edition subscribers. When that model dies you can expect to be paying for your online access to news, and especially in-depth investigative reporting (costly to produce) . . . the new Kindle is the setup for that model.
There's no such thing as a free lunch . . . the writers and researchers must be paid, and right now the online ad revenue doesn't begin to fund the operation.
New online media are trying various models, and one I like is MinnPost.com, where it is being run as a nonprofit with member donations (like Minnesota Public Radio). Of course this won't be the solution for all.