Coyne v. Wells on the sorry, sorry state of the media: All the self-pity, and twice the denial!

By the way, the IPOD has NOT saved the music industry. If anything its slowed the decline. Buts the sum of micropayments there too doesn’t make up for lost album sales, as far as I can see.

Here’s one solution — free morning tabloid distribution disappears while public transit ridership increases owing to recession. Those long commutes require reading material, ergo buying and reading newspapers become popular once more, for a time at least.

Simply trying to cheer you.

People will never lose their appetite for information so the medium and the cost remains the issue as you touch on in your discussion. (Content only affects potential market — not buyers’ innate desire for any medium.)

What I’m trying to say is, relax (prudently) — we’re all going through an adjustment and we’ll adapt.

A problem is that the online product is just a regurgitation of the print product so you force people to ask ‘why should I pay for this’? Instead they should fee each other. Subscribe to the print edition and online you get access to not just the articles, but back up research, maybe some of the reporters notes, portions of the article cut for space, links embedded within the article or the extras to prior articles on the same matter, etc. Someone want to just see that extra material? No problem, just subscribe to the print edition and opt to not receive the actual paper. You’ll still drive up your circulation numbers and your circulation dollars.

Plus, allow subscribers to organize their own news online: I like to see lots of headlines with the lede from the Canada, Ontario, Toronto and ROB sections of the Globe so let me organize it that way the way I can organize my free yahoo.news or google.news. The technology is there.

A second problem is that, while I subscribe to the Globe, I like to read from many papers on certain topics to get a variety of viewpoints. Especially on politics, I like to see what the NP, the Calgary papers, the Washington and NY papers and some non-conventional sources are writing about a particular issue. News aggregators like Drudge or National Newswatch are huge because of this. So partner up with your competitors or other cities papers and offer a general subscriber service: I subscribe to your print edition, you allow me to read it and, in one place, a whole bunch of newspapers and magazines as a featured add-on service.

A third problem was mentioned by Coyne. The cost of archived material. $5 for an article at the Globe is so out of touch with online information distribution that it alone highlights how far out of it some are.

In all these cases the solution is the based on the same simple solution: Make it easy for me to collect more information how and when a reader wants to.

Must be the auto industry tightening their budget. They spent $1.5 Billion on advertising last year.
The old regulars are now just fuel for the popular bloggers .And I am enjoying them, altho it can be time consuming.And addictive.But atleast I don’t have to see all that stuff about cars.

The slow death of print media is a lot like the slow death of the music industry—they’re both being made obsolete by changing tastes/consumption habits. So I’m not sure “relaxation” is really in order here.

There’s a key difference between the two, though—and it doesn’t favour journalists. The difference is that Individual musicians aren’t actually suffering that much from downloading because they have other sources of revenue that are still directly (and traditionally) linked to their work: concerts, merchandise, selling songs to advertisers, etc. Writers, on the other hand, have no other avenues than going through publishing houses that are, in effect, the print media industry’s equivalent to record labels. And even when new avenues have presented themselves—things like web, multimedia, data mashups, etc.—writers have proven to be a pretty conservative bunch and never really embraced them. That said, unlike concerts and t-shirts, all that techy stuff hasn’t been monetized yet, so maybe there’s a good reason for the skepticism. But perhaps that’s where micropayments come in. Just like you pay for the time- and place-limited experience of a concert, maybe that’s how journalism should be consumed.

Either way, I still think I should have gone to law school.

I talk to and interact with boomers and the elderly on a regular basis. I don’t think the culture is being dumbed down at all. Some of that golden nostalgia for the age that never was popping up again.

I have no useful comment again, just want to encourage more of these. And I’ll pony up my nickel when it comes to that.