As a family decision, we are canceling our subscription to the Rocky Mountain News। This is based on several factors: Because we rarely have time to read it, we get most of our news from the internet, and it has a lot of ads which just increases the sense of comsumerism in the household, and distracts from real issues that always need to addressed. If we need a copy, we can always go across the street to the Loaf and Jug
We have had a subscription for about 10 years. I will miss the ads I guess. Anyone else remove this from their lives?
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Joe Walsh proved prophetic:
Spent the last year
Rocky Mountain Way
Couldn't get much higher
Out to pasture
Think it's safe to say
Time to open fire
And we don't need the ladies
Crying 'cuz the storie's sad...
Well he's tellin' us this
And he's tellin' us that
Changes it every day...
http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/joedirt/rockymountainway.htm
This issue has been discussed in several posts this month at Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Con" blog at BeliefNet, with echoing comments.
Dreher: "Nothing more needs to be said about online news destroying the economic base of traditional newspapering, though it is noteworthy, at least to me, that I have lots of smart, educated friends who keep up with the news, but only online. Few subscribe to the newspapers.
What I'm thinking about this morning is what happened at my place yesterday. Julie decided she wanted to get rid of a particular piece of furniture we had. She put an ad on Craigslist Dallas. Within minutes, she'd sold the thing. When the purchaser who bought it showed up later to pick it up, we talked about the virtues of Craigslist. I told her that the problem with Craigslist was that it meant people didn't have to buy classified ads anymore -- which really hurt my industry.
"You work for the newspaper?" she said. "Um, we don't subscribe. Sorry! I miss the ritual of reading the morning paper with my coffee, but given that you can get the same information online, my husband and I figured that was one expense we just couldn't afford anymore."
She was clearly an educated woman, and was embarrassed to admit what she'd just admitted. But it is what it is...What if the technological and cultural revolutions underway are beyond anybody's ability to control? I think that's probably true, and the media entities (notice I didn't say "newspapers") that survive will be those most capable of riding the wave without being swamped."
http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/01/why-mainstream-journalism-is-i.html
Dreher also began to "think about which media figures are most influential in framing the kinds of things I think about. In my mom and dad's day, it would have been Cronkite, or whoever reads the evening news program they watch (maybe it still is). As for me, leaving aside the behind-the-scenes journalists (top editors, producers) whose job it is to set the agenda for the next day's paper/broadcast, I have to say that the answer is almost exclusively ... bloggers. There are about nine or 10 blogs I check in with daily, and though I definitely don't share the political views of all of them (or any one of them consistently), the kinds of stories that grab those bloggers' attention are the kinds of stories that I'm usually focusing on.
I was kind of taken aback to realize that, actually: that I'm a paid-up member of the Mainstream Media, but I take my intellectual cues not primarily from establishment media, but from weblogs. And here's one reason: this afternoon I have to finish my column for this coming Sunday's paper. It needs to be edited by Wednesday to fit our production schedule. I can do some tweaking on Friday if necessary, but it's pretty much a lock. I know what I'm writing about, and I will have written about a similar topic all week on my blog, and probably read three or four blogs commenting on the same thing by the time my dead-tree column is published. It's not that you can't get smart, interesting opinion journalism in conventional ways. It's that by the time the columns appear in print, your favorite bloggers have likely already had their say about it, and at least half of them had a better take than the columnist."
http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/01/whos-your-cronkite.html
Thanks Scott. I told the Rocky folks that it wasn't the cost, its just that we don't read it anymore. The net is where the action is today.
I find having a feed reader for my regular web sites a real blessing, a novelty that never wears off and a real timesaver. Those without may take a tour of the one I use, Google Reader, at
http://www.google.com/reader
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