Posted on 02/20/2005 9:00:17 AM PST by drt1
Daily papers face unprecedented competition. WASHINGTON - The venerable newspaper is in trouble. Under sustained assault from cable television, the Internet, all-news radio and lifestyles so cram-packed they leave little time for the daily paper, the industry is struggling to remake itself.
Papers are conducting exhaustive surveys to find out what readers want. They are launching new sections, beefing up Web sites and spinning off free community papers and commuter giveaways in hopes of widening their audience. They even are trying to change the very language of the industry, asking advertisers and investors to dwell less on "circulation" -- how many papers are sold -- and more on "readership," or the number of people exposed to a paper's journalism wherever it appears, in print, on the Web or over the air....
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
I think I and many others here can tell them what they need to do without 'Exhaustive surveys'. They just don't want to hear it.
you got that right!
Americans prefer softer toilet paper, packaged in rolls and not already FOS.
How about accuracy? How about non biased news stories?..Keep bias in the opinion pages.
Don't decide you are the gate keepers...Don't repeat a story from another source without checking it out...Don't be so lazy!
Ding Dong the witch is dead!
The internet, bloggers, talk radio; all of these things have produced a shift in the thinking of mainstream America. My advice to the newspapers? Find another line of work. Your star has risen and has now been permanently eclipsed. The internet is a window onto the world; much fact, some fiction, some outright untruth. But it isn't difficult to sort through and find the truth.
What's a "newspaper"?
I'd love to fill out one of their exhaustive surveys and tell them to print NEWS instead of journalistic, left-bent opinions.
Well, what can you say? They can't even find the truth when it's staring them in the face. They go out and fund surveys to find out what they are unwilling to admit.
Big city newspapers ought to get out in the hinterlands and look at local small city papers. They generally reflect the thoughts of residents, not the weighty (or weightless)left wing thinking of the elites.
"Papers are conducting exhaustive surveys to find out what readers want"
Well, their circulation figures are a daily survey of what people want, now aren't they?
Also, I don't want the pounds of paper in my house that a newspaper creates. To top it off, practically everything I read in a newspaper, I already read on the net, in greater depth, with more perspective, three days ago.
How about not printing secretly recorded tapes of the President offered to you by a Judas who passed himself off as a friend to make a buck? Of course, that would have meant having more ethics than he had, and we know the problem with that.
I agree with you, further, take the washington post, from which the article originates. I haven't read one in 5 years, but in the odd chance I find a link on the net to their website, I have to fill out an exhaustive questionaire, and so I move on, except for rare exceptions.
The point being, if they want their content read, so they can benefit from advertising, they should make it more accessible in whatever medium a reader chooses. Excerpting limitations, such as those that apply to this forum are also curious limits.
I'm simply not going to pay for the content the Post offers, but if they made it easier to access and encouraged people to explore deeper by allowing extensive excerpting as long as it is fairly attributed to them, they *may* be able to extract ad revenue.
Of course they could take it too far, like Drudge, who's site I also rarely visit because of it's propensity for annoying ads.
They could also simply make it a pay site, but I think they already know what would happen if they did that.
Some times they come around and throw free copies on the driveways of everyone in the neighborhood. Last time they did that, I called up and threatened to call the cops if they didn't stop littering my driveway. They stopped.
pinger
The American people want what Clark Kent --reporter and Superman wanted ---Truth Justice and the American way.
What we dont want is American journalists who wont wear American flags because they might make the seem biased.
Americans want the news ,we want it fair and unbiased we are smart enough to judge for ourselves we dont need the Journalists slant we want the facts.
Simple. Readers want news that is fact-based & presented in accurate context - not the drivel of someone who majored in journalism so they could go out and "change the world."
The problem with newspaper organizations is their front pages are politicized; opinion is not reserved for the Opinion/Editorial pages. People do not want that - plain and simple. Forget the "exhaustive surveys."
Have you tried www.bugmenot.com to get around the WaPo registration?
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