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akivory

Joined
Feb 5, 2001
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Here is a story about how newspapers have been steadily loosing readers .It is kind of funny because last week let my subscriptions to our local paper run out. For thirty five years I have had a habit of reading the paper over a cup of coffee every morning. In the last few months I have found myself checking out the new online, skipping the paper and heading for the shop earlier. By the time I get in the house in the evening the paper has been thrown out.

http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzcirc0503,0,3464263,print.story?coll=ny-business-leadheadlines
 
Our local all-news radio station has this tagline:

"If you hear it on the radio, it's news; if you read it in the paper it's history."
 
Me too. I get the Sunday edition for the ads... Everything else online. Here at the university, the newspapers have a "college readership" program, where they put out free copies of the NYT, USA Today, and the local Post-Dispatch.

They seem to vanish at a pretty good rate, but I think it's mostly staff and faculty taking them...hehe.

I have the "My Yahoo" page set up with news headlines from a dozen different sources.
 
Rugger, the real world equivalent of that is my local library. They not only have all the area newspapers, including the NYT, but magazines, two whole walls of magazine rack, with previous copies in a drawer under each current copy, magazines I never heard of alongside all the common mags. At one time I was going there two, three times a week and reading every magazine I could get to. :)

Then I got my computer hooked up and I read what you guys write instead. :(
 
My son speaks most disparagingly of "dead tree editions", but I notice that he visits web sites of only those who agree with him, now literalist Christian right-wing Republicans who oppose any form of abortion for any reason, including the life of the mother. That, and he listens only to WAVA, now a "Christian" radio station that programs only the most fundamentalist of Christian viewpoints.

Actually, he represents a disturbing trend in modern America. It is the splintering of our culture into multiple little groups who can happily exist without really ever having to come into contact with anyone who disagrees with them. This is part of why I continue to hang out in the Political Forum, frustrating as it gets for me sometimes. I want to expose myself to what people with whom I have basic disagreements are thinking as well as exposing them to my thoughts. Both of us need disturbing.

And, if you note the irony of my son becoming so much what his parents are not, I like to think that my Mother is sitting on a cloud somewhere. She is watching and laughing her astral butt off, since she died in 1986, when my son was 12 years old. You see, my parents were rock-ribbed Republicans of the yellow dog variety. I do believe that the only Democrats for whom I ever remember them voting were Senators Harry Byrd, Sr. & Jr. and Rep. Howard Smith when his district covered all of Virginia north of the Rappahannock River. Dad was a West Point grad and Mom was the daughter of a West Point grad, raised in the Old (Pre-WWII) Army. They were both very conservative, including their position on reproductive rights, which was right in line with Barry Goldwater's and with Ken Cox's. They were quite distressed when I married Georgia and began to get active in the anti-VietNam War movement in about 1968-1969 and then in NOW in 1975. That is why I see my Mom as laughig her astral butt off at how our son has turned out.
 
FullerH said:
Actually, he represents a disturbing trend in modern America. It is the splintering of our culture into multiple little groups who can happily exist without really ever having to come into contact with anyone who disagrees with them.
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Hugh, what you are describing is not a trend peculiar to modern America. It is the way of the world, overwhelmingly the only choice for most pre-modern communities, where news of the wider world and different opinions about the local issues of the day were effectively non-existent.

It is only in this Information Age that we expect people even in the most hidden corners of the world to have some access to what different people, societies, and cultures find important.

The splintering you refer to is only a logical effect of facing a multiplicity of aggressive outlooks, each with its own support structure to inform and protect its adherents. People do seek security and familiarity. This is not wrong in itself. Young people do not tend to be subtle in their judgements. Give him time.
 
Esav Benyamin said:
Rugger, the real world equivalent of that is my local library. They not only have all the area newspapers, including the NYT, but magazines, two whole walls of magazine rack, with previous copies in a drawer under each current copy, magazines I never heard of alongside all the common mags. At one time I was going there two, three times a week and reading every magazine I could get to. :)

Then I got my computer hooked up and I read what you guys write instead. :(
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I much prefer the real world/real time version, but I don't have the time to haunt the stacks as I'd like. Left to my own designs, I'd be alternately sunburned & ink-smudged from various pursuits.
 
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