I could not name you an under-25 year old who subscribes to a print newspaper | Hacker News Reader

I could not name you an under-25 year old who subscribes to a print newspaper

nytpick.com

27 pointsderekc42 comments

A subscription to the New York Times costs $769.60 per year. A good chunk of that is printing and delivery costs for something I don't want anyway: a giant stack of physical paper. On top of the odd environmental disconnect of shipping a whole tree's worth of paper to each individual customer in tiny chunks every day over a year, there's the disconnect of customers paying to have advertising delivered to them.

How they expect people to pay for that in a world where I can read their best articles online for free is totally beyond me.

What I would like to see is:

- An iPad version of the full paper (not just the selections they have now).

- No advertising.

- A price reflective of the reduced printing and delivery costs. I don't want to subsidize the physical paper subscriptions of other people.

- Fast search and access to the archives from within the iPad app.

Then again, as long as the web site remains free (although hobbled by advertising and splitting articles across pages), I doubt the iPad app would get much traction. You never know though.

Also, with all that said, I don't live in New York. For my local paper (the San Francisco Chronicle) to warrant me subscribing, they'd need to start doing some real journalism. For example, they could look at the city and state government. In a budget crisis, you'd think there would be plenty of material to use. The milquetoast reporting they currently practice isn't worth any of my money.

You're telling the papers to: (1) Get rid of their largest revenue stream (advertising), and (2) Increase spending (more reporters).

How does that work?

By (3) reducing costs by eliminating the need for a massive amount of the company.

I'd be surprised beyond belief if it turns out they paid their reporting wing of the company more than they (collectively) paid their printing and distribution wings. And remember that the distribution includes all shipments US / worldwide, and all end-point delivery people.

I'm telling them to get rid of their biggest cost: printing and distribution.

Also, I'm not saying they should get rid of the classifieds section, which is a big chunk (about half? hard to find any data on it) of their advertising income.

As for reporters: they're cheap. In the range of $40-100k (from quick Google search) a year for a New York Times reporter. Much less at other papers. Hire 10 reporters to dig into corruption, waste, and fraud in San Francisco and I'd be happy to plunk down a subscription fee.

"Hire 10 reporters to dig into corruption, waste, and fraud"

Isn't that actually the job of the police?

The police investigates crimes that have already been observed. Journalists have the freedom to investigate potential crimes based on their gut feeling. Recall Enron - a police officer standing anywhere in Headquarters would have missed a crime. However, some pesky reporters asking too many questions brought the whole operation to its knees.

>>>Isn't that actually the job of the police?

What? No. Police are not investigators. They are there to arrest -- or use force -- period. They are intake and barriers, not processing.

I used to believe that the IT department at my work didn't need more than 10 programmers.

I agree with you, except perhaps on the "no advertising" bit. Advertising often serves a useful purpose in a community. How to translate to the Web, I'm not sure.

For an alternative news source in the Bay Area, take a look at http://www.baycitizen.org

I subscribed to the San Jose Mercury News once because some kid came door to door signing people up as a fundraiser. I gave in because his pitch was so self aware: "Hey man, I know nobody wants the paper, but would you still mind helping me out?"

I did, for $20, and it was an obnoxious several months waiting for the paper to stop. I had twice as much crap to throw away every week as usual, and I didn't read the paper once.

The worst part is that now every newspaper in the bay area has me on their list of people-who-might-buy-a-paper and calls me every two weeks trying to get me to subscribe. When they call I tell them that I'd be happy to subscribe to support the paper if they can guarantee me that I'll never _ever_ receive a physical newspaper. So far none have been able to.

This was actually one of the biggest reasons I cancelled my paper subscription too: far too much paper was piling up in my apartment relative to how much reading it provided me. It didn't help that my apartment complex's recycling area was somewhat awkward to get to, and I felt bad throwing the paper in the trash, so it became this perennial TODO item of "clear out huge piles of newspaper clogging the entryway".

Now I subscribe to The Economist, which delivers one, ~100-page magazine a week, which is closer to the amount of in-depth, on-paper news analysis I'll actually read in a given week. It also has a lot less filler that I'd never read, like the pages of sports scores or stock quotes that the local paper liked to include. Somehow in 2010, the idea of printing out thousands of stock prices on a piece of paper every 24 hours seems absurd, like some kind of syslog that logs to a line printer.

You would really give charity to a newspaper?

I guess you could just buy some ads from them.

I give to NPR every year. I don't see much difference in how I should act towards the two organizations despite the newspapers ostensibly being for-profit (ha). I like NPR's product more, but they both provide a really valuable public service that I'm happy to pay for.

I don't know if newspapers can maintain their newsrooms on an NPR-sized budget, but I'd love to see them go that route.

I think 25 is a pretty low limit.

This is all anecdotal, but I know probably a few hundred people in the 21-30 age bracket, and I can only think of three who get a paper (the WSJ in every case) delivered daily. There are a few more who will grab a daily during a lunch break, but the vast majority of people I know who read a paper will only read the free ones. (Here in Philadelphia we have three major free ones--a daily and two weeklies.)

A few months back I tried to watch the ABC news podcast at lunch every day to make sure I wasn't missing any important news. I kept it up for a few weeks, but gave up when I realized only about 10% of the running time covered stories I hadn't already consumed online before even the episode's original airtime. Since I don't read a daily, I don't know if that's the case for them, but I have a feeling that between Google Reader and Twitter I have a better tailored, more complete picture of the world than I can get could from one daily source.

It's definitely an weird feeling to hear news from a reputable source, and realize everything they are saying that you care about, you already heard about a week ago! This supports my notion that newspapers etc are primarily useful to get a high-level overview of things that you don't personally care so much about.

Im not sure the "under 25" demographic was ever a hot market for purchasing print newspapers, at any time.

I'm 28 now. I grew up reading three papers every day, and most of my bonding time with my father was with us sharing papers at the kitchen table. I graduated from a pretty good university more than half a decade ago. I was a gainfully employed professional, and now I'm a small business owner. Everything about me suggests that I should be an exceptionally good newspaper customer.

And I can scarcely imagine buying a newspaper subscription. The notion is downright puzzling, like someone suggesting I sew all my own clothes. I mean, sure, somebody somewhere must enjoy sewing all their own clothes, but me? Really? Like, with thread? You expect that from me?

Reading a newspaper is a completely different experience to getting all your news online.

I started getting newspapers delivered when I was about 20 (I'm 32 now).

The funny thing is people who moan on and on and make fun of people who get their news from Fox news, with its obvious biases. But then they themselves get their news solely from Reddit, The daily show, Twitter?!! etc with their even more obvious biases and inaccuracies.

I'll always buy a newspaper, it won't be my only source for news by any means, but it's something to read at the breakfast table etc. It gives me a neat already compiled summary of what's going on. No website I've ever seen can do that well.

I don't understand your analogy with sewing. Getting a newspaper is getting an edited summary of the days news. It's a finished garment. You choose whichever paper seems to fit with your own particular politics and they do all the work for you. Getting your news yourself, trying to sort the biases out, trying to get rid of all the inaccurate news - that's like someone suggesting you sew all your own clothes. The web is full of so much crap, how do you know what to believe? How do you know what's important?

If I got all my news online, either I'd waste all day trying to find articles, fact check, work out what's going on, or I'd have such an inaccurate and biased picture of the world I'd be worrying forever about stupid things - eg if you only looked at Reddit you'd be forever worrying about gay marriage, CCTV in Britain, and all the other things Reddit loves to worry about. In fact I'd say Reddit has pretty much turned into the opposite of Fox News, which isn't a good thing at all.

I guess I don't see what's totally different between reading printed newspapers and reading any of those same newspapers on the internet. If you subscribe to the New York Times, and I read nytimes.com, how is the news we're reading any different in terms of article quality, nice summary of the news, etc.? When I think of "getting news online", I think of basically that: the same newspapers you could buy, except now they're on the internet.

The profile of how I read a paper newspaper and an online one is drastically different. The first bit of each story in a paper newspaper requires zero activation energy or decision-making on my part to read, so I end up reading the first bits of most of the stories on the front page until and unless I find something sufficiently interesting to warrant flailing and fighting and folding the paper back and forth until I get the rest of it.

Online, I scan headlines until I find one sufficiently interesting to click on, and then I read the whole article.

The result is that the paper newspaper is a better survey of what's going on, since reporters are good at getting the high bits of the story in the part on the front page.

That doesn't mean I'd subscribe to a paper paper, though.

What about amongst bored university students?

My first job after lectures and eating lunch, was to read through the Times, Scotsman, Guardian and Independent. And this is back in the day when all these papers were in 'broadsheet' form, not the flimsy tabloids of today.

I might have been the exception. ;-)

I used to do the same thing, but the papers were free and left out in bins by the cafeteria entrance. I think lots of people will pick up a paper and read it while they drink coffee or eat lunch (even if it's just for the crossword or funnies).

But newspapers are interested, obviously, in who will actually buy it. And I'm not sure that those free subscriptions in college really translated into many post-college sales, at least not immediately.

FWIW, I do subscribe to two papers now, one daily and one just Sundays. The daily is for news, the Sunday is for the coupons. (Coupons pay for the paper many times over if you use them.) The daily was absurdly cheap when I bought the subscription ... less than a dime or so a day IIRC. It won't be that cheap when the subscription runs out so I doubt I'll renew. Most days I don't read it and I feel bad about all the waste.

Yes, but did you pay for these papers or pick them up off the table in the lounge?

The under-25 demographic is especially challenging as half are still dependent on their families and living at home (and thus would be reading the family newspaper), half don't have a steady address, half don't have money for things less important than sustenance, and half don't have space to put something like newspapers. Yes, I know that's a lot of halves.

I'm 20, and I get the Guardian and the Financial Times (in the UK) every day. I don't actually subscribe to them, rather buy them from the shop each day, but that's just because my job takes me away from home regularly (in 2009 I spent 170/365 days at various events around the world) so subscribing would just be a waste for me.

I do have subscriptions to two weekly magazines (on news), a biweekly magazine (satirical/news) and four monthly magazines (tech & lifestyle).

An interesting note on the subject of magazines: PricewaterhouseCoopers released their "Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2010-2014" report a few days ago, and their view on magazine sales is:

"Total global spending on consumer magazines fell by 10.6 percent in 2009. We project an additional 2.7 per cent decrease in 2010, a flat market in 2011, and modest growth during 2012-14. As a result, spending will total $74 billion in 2014, up 0.7 percent compounded annually from $71.5 billion in 2009."

I'm waay past 25, but I can't see subscribing to a print paper any more. I had a WSJ subscription at one point in my life, could almost see doing that again, but it doesn't seem to have the value it once had.

I live in LA, I buy the LA Times sometimes, and I think it's a good paper that's gotten better by focusing more on local news than national or world stories. I don't want a subscription just because of the hassle of the dealing with it physically every day.

I've had a subscription to The Economist running for years, and it is very much worth having for physical perusing. I have subscribed to Nature on and off over the years, and would consider it again.

I have an electronic subscription to Variety, the Hollywood trade daily. I would go physical if I had an office to deliver it to.

I turned 25 two days ago, but I have a newspaper subscription here I share with my roommates. We also get a weekly magazine, something like TIME magazine. Also I know a number of people in the same demographic, with the same model.

This is in Germany, don't know if that makes a difference.

Basically, newspapers and magazines have the same problem as CDs: you have to buy a bunch of crap in order to get the one or two bits that you actually like.

I suspect that ones that serve a focused niche will continue to survive, just not at the size they've been used to.

I'm 29 and I've never subscribed to a paper.

Even if the only way to get news was to pay for it, I'd pay for a digital subscription of some kind before I'd ever consider subscribing to a paper. Newspapers are wasteful, messy, and of course unwieldy. Annoying to handle and laid out so articles are always split up randomly across multiple huge, floppy pages.

Or I can have the convenience of being able to read the news anywhere, have each article be contiguous and usually on one page, never have to throw anything away, etc. The fact that I can get my news for free digitally is a bonus, really.

I'm mid-fifties and grew up reading every paper I could get me hands on, along with all the major newsweeklies. That was then. Now some days my local newspaper is handing out free sample copies on the street and most times I couldn't be bothered. Newspaper? It's over for me.

I recently looked into subscribing to the International Herald. It just costs way too much for a poor student like me. Especially when I'm not entirely sure if I'll manage to read it and if I like the content. But I'll probably subscribe when I get a steady income.

Subscriptions made buying papers more convenient and often cheaper (though not always, weirdly!). No more trips to newsagent in the rain to find they have sold out etc etc. The net has more or less trounced them in the convenience stakes. Now arranging a sub and waiting for the postman to arrive is more of a hassle than firing up a browser whenever I want to catch up.

I still buy newspapers - maybe more than I used to, but a subscription these days just seems a bit pointless far as I'm concerned. Not only that, but the quality of free gifts for signing up has fallen to a shocking, almost insulting, level!

Sent from my iDevice so please forgive the fresh he'll that is my auto-spelling.

There's just so many ways to consume information these days, that physical newspapers seem to be the least effective medium at this point. I subscribe to the NYT on my Kindle and haven't looked back.

They aren't doing themselves any favors by sticking with the large paper format either. Trying to read a newspaper in any sort of tight quarters like an airplane is a fools errand. I'm curious if they've ever considered making newspapers magazine sized.

Hello. I'm 23 and I've had a times subscription for the last 5 years (since leaving home). But, yeh. I'm in a minority I think.

I used to subscribe to one last year, but I just wasn't reading the whole thing. It was a pain to go online and find out more information, to participate in any discussions or to lookup words or terms I didn't know. Then I got Google Reader and canceled that subscription. Never going back. (under 25)

My friend is getting his Bachelors in Business and in one of his classes his professor recommended that everyone subscribe to the wall street journal. He did but he has never picked one up we have a nice stack by our shoes.

Me and the WSJ. You lose?

me too, used to get the WSJ before I was 25. I'm pretty busy and find significant value in being able to scan headlines in the morning. These days though, I get a bunch of RSS feeds in my google reader and scan them that way. In fact, that's how I read HN.

I get the Sunday SF Chronicle, and am <25 for another 6 months.

Ok gotta ask... Why??

because he was born 24 years and 6 months ago, duh! ;-)

I find reading newspapers to be a waste of time, I much rather just listen to pure news on the radio, news that has no opinion. It just says "10 killed in Hurricane", "BP tried to stop the leak this way, and it fauled, will try method X tommrow"

Thats all I really care about. I don't need to be fed opinion, especially not social liberal ramblings from the NYT or WSJ. If I want to know more about something, I read a book on the matter.

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