The day the newspaper died. | Hacker News Reader

The day the newspaper died.

newyorker.com

9 pointsksvs7 comments

For my money, there's still nothing better than a good newspaper. We get the Washington Post here. On TV, the broadcaster controls the order and scope of reporting (you're fed the news). On the internet, vital information can easily become unreachable due to developer mistakes or usability problems.

With a newspaper, everything is in front of you and is in the same place. It's been in that place for years and will remain there in the near future. If there were an accepted (and acceptable) format for online news, this would be a non-issue, but until then, I'll continue to get my news from the newspaper. It's durable and only requires reading light.

It's also nice to avoid using a screen for everything.

I'm especially going to miss local and regional coverage if newspapers go away. I think that the internet does a better job with national and international news, but I rely almost entirely on newspapers for local coverage. In the Chicago area, at least, the Tribune has done an excellent job with local news. Not only do they do a decent job with most major stories, but they've put out a lot of great investigative series in the past. Among other things, they were key in exposing corruption to the public in a number of cases, including George Ryan. The paper has already been cut back considerably, and if they go away entirely I think that it will be a large loss for the Chicago area.

For my money, there's still nothing better than a good newspaper. We get the Washington Post here.

OK. What is the marginal cost of printing and delivering a weekday copy of the Washington Post?

http://www.mondaynote.com/2008/09/29/the-economics-of-moving...

First, the cost structure of a daily. In a typical operation, the biggest costs are industrial ones: around 25%-35% for paper and printing; another 30%-40% for distribution; around 18-25% for editorial; the remaining 10-15% are for administrative and marketing expenditures. It varies from country to country but we can safely assert most of the costs — at least 60% — are industrial in nature. Evidently, that part disappears when going online.

Those stats are mixed. Paper, printing, and delivery are requirements exclusive to printed news. However, editorial and marketing are not. In any case, until an online resource can outcompete the printed edition of the Post, I'll continue to pay the $1-200/year to have it delivered to my door.

"In the eighteenth century, the death of a newspaper signalled the death of liberty. What it signals now is harder to know, especially because there’s death, and then there’s death. If, one day, ink-and-print is dead and gone, newspapers will endure, wraiths of ether."

There is some good historical perspective on the role of newspapers in this article. Like many New Yorker articles, it is a good read.

"Early American newspapers tend to look like one long and uninterrupted invective, a ragged fleet of dung barges."

Makes me think of the blogosphere today. I wonder if in 100 years there will still be internet news, but it will have grown boring. Comment sections will be full of somewhat-intelligent-but-mainstream discourse, and antiestablishment types are flocking to the superinternet.

"Mediasaurus" article by Michael Crichton. Nuff said.

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