In Journalism school I used to read 3-4 daily newspapers. Slowly it dwindled to one. Since COVID they no longer deliver it to my door. Guy drives by at 30 mph and just chucks it. He has unerring accuracy to land it in a puddle if there is one nearby. Or he forgets to deliver at all.
The newspaper will not take phone calls from subscribers. The customer 800 number routes you to India where you can hear roosters crowing whenever you call them. They always promise to send a 'strong letter' to the circulation manager but nothing ever changes.
The paper is a third the size it was in the seventies. I am close to cutting back to the digital equivalent which is a poorly formatted PDF :<(. The Detroit newspapers only publish 4 days a week. They stopped accepting letters to the editor. They couldn't be working any harder to drive people away.
You forgot to mention the price increases. As our daily paper has become thinner, they've charged more and more for it. For example, from Jan 2023 to Jan 2024, it increased on price by 60%.
I want to support local journalism. It is important to me and my community. But paying more to get less makes is hard.
I think in the past more advertising paid since your attention was also the product. Easier to got to FB now since you can measure ROI and reach way more people.
It does seem like the news industry is in a real bind.
Yes, I am paying $85 a month for a paper that publishes six days a week and never on holidays. There is almost zero investigative news. When the Dr. Larry Nassar story broke at Michigan State it took close to a week before it appeared. Grant you the counter culture weekly in Lansing published on it a day after the Indianapolis paper broke the original story.
I'm happy the price of my local weekly paper (about £2.50) for a town of about 10,000 (most of the paper is the wider county which has a 300k, the first 4 or 6 pages are specifically local)
Because if I (and the others that do pay) don't pay it for local news, then nobody will cover local news, and I value local news coverage far more than £2.50 a week.
Think of it as paying for a youtube channel on patreon.
The paper's back end systems must be a train wreck. We've got the opposite problem - bought a house where the previous occupant had a subscription and they can't seem to update the delivery. Every time it snows I have to find the paper before I snow blow the driveway. If we are ever gone, we end up with a pile of papers in our driveway. We've called, and can connect eventually to a human, which usually gets us a week of paused delivery. I wish I could rid myself of this litter.
> And there’s a funny story about Chomsky... He went to the dentist and the dentist said, well your teeth are alright but you gotta stop grinding them. He said, I don’t grind my teeth. The doctor said, you do, your enamel is worn off. So Mrs. Chomsky was there and he asked her: does he grind his teeth in his sleep? No, no he doesn’t do that. Well they both got terribly interested—when did it happen? Well they finally found out that in the morning while having coffee, and [Mrs. Chomsky] might be out of the room, he would start to read the New York Times and his teeth would GggRRrGRrrhahaha
Strong recommend for Branko Milanovic's substack. He is a very unusual combination of (1) a serious economist who does highly respected work on global inequality and (2) a real, old-school, Proust-reading European intellectual. (He's the guy, IIRC, who first drew the famous "elephant graph" of global inequality.)
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and people read newspapers on public transport, there were all sorts of (mostly unspoken) etiquette rules around how to do so.
For instance, everyone would silently angle themselves (and their newspapers) so as not to interfere with anyone else's newspapers. As more people joined the bus or train, you'd switch from opening your newspaper up all the way to folding the pages back on themselves - advanced users developed abstruse folding techniques to follow stories that jumped from page to page.
When you disembarked was usual, and considered polite, to leave behind on your seat the sections you'd finished. People who were poor, or had been in a rush, or who had not happened to have a quarter in their pocket would descend, and sometimes engage in one-word negotiations over the sections: "Sports?", "Front page".
When I started work in 2003 in London, buying the Evening Standard from the newspaper chap on the way to the station was a normal thing, but the morning paper was on the way out as a free paper "The Metro" had taken root.
The launch of an evening version ("The London Paper") soon put an end to that, and the standard eventually became free in 2009. A couple of years later smartphones started to take the place of the "something to look at" - at least on the surface lines.
You will see people reading a paper on the London tube most days, because The Metro (AM) and Evening Standard (PM) are free papers, with stacks of them left near entrances to stations. The Metro has national distribution as well, so you're just as likely to see it on a bus or tram in Manchester.
There is a slightly weird thing about accuracy and impartiality in news I've noticed to be a major difference in the UK and the US.
In the UK you can print in a newspaper anything that is legal, including non-libellous lies. There is no need to show both sides of the argument, and as a result the paper can come across as an unhinged political mouthpiece of their owner, with editorial pages just dialling it up. The Times and the FT are the only papers that even attempt neutrality, really.
TV news however is very strictly regulated by Ofcom - partisan news channels like GB News are constantly running into issues, because they aren't meeting the regulatory requirements for fairness and impartiality. There are no editorial "entertainment" shows like you would see in the US on BBC or Sky News - if they bring in a pundit from the right wing, sat right next to them is a left wing pundit to call them out, and vice versa.
In the US it seems inverse. TV news is insanely partisan (on all sides, I literally can't watch any of it when I'm travelling in the US, and CNN in the US is atrocious compared to CNN International), but even though the newspaper industry is unregulated and has First Amendment rights, the standards for accuracy and fairness seem much higher than in the UK (supermarket tabloids - staffed for many years by ex-UK tabloid hacks - aside). I wish other nations could learn from that.
I really don't know why this is the case though. The market for newspapers seems to be causing them to regulate more widely towards this, and there's something news on the internet could learn from that: perhaps clickbait isn't the way to go strategically.
The Times could perhaps be leaning “right”. But the FT is, in my opinion, a legitimately neutral publication. At least through Britain’s default neoliberal lens.
The Times has lurched extremely far right within the last decade. The main difference between it and the Telegraph or Daily Mail is one of tone rather than content.
The FT certainly has its biases but I agree that it is generally the most reliable. Noam Chomsky once said it was the most trustworthy newspaper because of its incentives to tell the truth:
> Those who Adam Smith called ‘the masters of the universe’ have to understand the universe. They have to have a tolerably realistic understanding of the world that they are managing and controlling. That’s true of political elites as well, but the business world particularly.
> > Anwar Shaikh, the most left-wing economist in the world, introduced me to “The Wall Street Journal”. I met him in his office as he was writing the monumental “Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises”. He told that he reads the WSJ because it tells the truth about what is happening in the economy. It struck me then by the seeming oddity of the most left-wing economist in the world praising the most right-wing daily in the world. But Anwar was right. An economics daily has, in the part that deals with the real life, to be as objective as possible because if it spreads fairy tales people who believe them will lose money. Then no capitalist will buy it. For they do not like to lose money. In the trade-off between the fairy tales and cash, they chose the latter. Other dailies that appeal to the “pensée unique” do not need to worry about that kind of elemental truth. They can make things up.
Well, to be fair I don't have a huge amount of information about the FT as I'm not a subscriber. I do remember that they did publish at least some Keynesian economists during the 2008 financial crisis, although I think they were still part of the prevailing (and IMO mistaken) bias towards austerity.
But I think no publication is completely neutral. There are areas where they will accept opinions as viable alternatives, and areas where they consider opinions outside the pale and not deserving of consideration. A completely biased publication always picks one side everywhere, but 'neutral' publications usually are biased towards which opinions they will give serious consideration.
They other dimension is that articles written in a neutral 'style' aren't necessarily any less biased than ones written in polemic style.
A note about TV news in the US: what you’re describing is 24/7 cable news, which is distinctly different than traditional nightly news and its offshoot streaming services.
Channels like MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News follow the aggressive style you describe.
However, programs like ABC, NBC, CBS, and ABC evening/nightly news are not like that at all. Unfortunately, you can’t really get those broadcasts abroad.
For a while, CNN’s international broadcast was a much different channel akin to the BBC world service, but I think now it follows the Fox News content formula.
On the bright side, I have noticed some emerging streaming options like the CBS News and ABC News streaming apps that offer a similar style of moderate journalism.
Finally, in the US the local TV news is another half-decent source of information that usually has a moderate slant. Networks are affiliated with the national networks and often mix in major national stories along with local ones. However, it has its own issues especially on locally relevant biases. I think their focus on local crime has a tendency to reinforce stereotypes and promote fear – it can sometimes feel like you’re watching white flight [1] television. Weirdly, one of my biggest problems with local news is weather event sensationalism: if you watch local news you’ll be convinced to cancel your whole life’s plans for big storms that don’t tend not to pan out. Crime and weather, weather, and traffic are basically the only two topics where something is consistently happening, so they get outsized attention.
There’s also some consolidation happening where the local news networks are owned by very opinionated and biased owners, like the Internet-famous Sinclair scripted message that all their regional networks were forced to recite verbatim.
Thanks for the clarification, but I was also comparing like with like: UK 24/7 cable news is strictly regulated, as per my comment.
Local news is less of a need in the UK (the entire country is half the size of California), and breaks down into two categories: BBC local news which is comprehensive, and basically every region is well covered with TV and radio journalism; and, private sector which is a license requirement for ITV (the main commercial broadcaster), and a dying small newspaper trade.
We don't however have anything like Sinclair which is something to be grateful for.
To be fair, compared to most EU countries, the level of accuracy and fairness of news in the Anglosphere is abysmal. If Die Zeit or Le Monde (Diplomatique) report something, in my opinion they tend to set the standard. In most (large enough) EU countries, people tend to have 1 or 2 decent sources for high quality news. Factual, avoiding emotion, reporting on what happened.
In Dutch, there is a word for English news: "hijgerig". The type of heavy breathing you do after running a sprint.
Unfortunately, that style is increasingly being copied.
This might be because the US video news you likely encountered was Cable News ( CNN, Fox , MSNBC ), which evolved under a different legal tradition than US printed news or US over-the-air broadcast radio and TV news. Sort of like how facebook/twitter have evolved under Section 230 of the DMCA rather than under the legal limitations of traditional broadcasters or publishers.
Man, I just got to read a paper edition of The Economist today. What a lovely experience. The crisp sound of paper, flipping through the pages with my own fingers, direct, effective, focused. All my memory neurons that wired together reading The Economist during my college years in those quite weekend mornings fired ferociously together. I can't even imagine how any gadget will ever beat it.
When I was in high school, any opportunity to find a print copy of The Economist was a moment to be cherished. The annual subscription was way beyond my means, but if we took a school trip downtown, or if my parents and I went to a bookstore, I'd absolutely grab a copy.
The Atlantic, however, was ridiculously affordable. I had a subscription by the time I was in my early 20s for, IIRC, about $14 a year. Might have even been $14 for two years.
I've been considering subscribing to newspapers again to avoid the bombardment of news online. I used to love waking up, making coffee, and sitting with the paper for some 30-45 minutes to start the day. Reading the news online in the morning has the opposite effect, I just feel drained and scatterbrained.
I remember arguing with a guy selling NRC trials. I was like all the news is available online. Online is where it happens. This was end of the '00 decade. iPhone was all hot and Nokia was in trouble. I couldn't imagine people would keep paying for newspapers. Why?
They're slow, old news. You pay for it and it still contains ads. Even the news on TV and radio was slower than the internet and also contained ads (we pay for public broadcasting / non-profit via taxation).
Only later on I realized in a world with limited time smarter folks read newspapers not for news but for interpretation. That doesn't have to be on same day as the news since it is an in-depth, well though, unique expert proposition (of course there is also pulp). Which was the USP the salesman was arguing.
How did it turn out? Internet became a world of tracking and advertising, the EU fought back with law.
And I just never liked the feel of newspapers because they're so large and thin it is hard to switch pages. I ended up damaging pages. Especially outside in the wind. Maybe the tabloid format (the status quo nowadays?) suffers less from it. But then again I am an e-reader person. A newspaper you can forget/lose/damage though, an e-reader or smartphone not so much.
I couldn't get into audiobooks (I miss too much / zone out) which saddens me. Because in-depth podcasts are definitely a guilty pleasure.
I still grab the free newspapers every time I am in the airport as I still love the look and feel and to flick through them. And I sometimes buy a paper when there is an iconic headline and keep the paper for historical record. You could say I have a historical blockchain made of paper :)
Yes I often check. More surprising than how often they got it wrong is how the people who got it right were ridiculed at the time. For example people who talked about the internet were mostly ridiculed in the early days
> Today's subway riders "watch people around them?" That's creepy and rude. Has NY changed so much?
I am not from NY, so maybe that's why I don't find it creepy or rude to pay attention to my surroundings when stuffed in a rolling can instead of staring at my shoes, but to each their own.
The newspaper will not take phone calls from subscribers. The customer 800 number routes you to India where you can hear roosters crowing whenever you call them. They always promise to send a 'strong letter' to the circulation manager but nothing ever changes.
The paper is a third the size it was in the seventies. I am close to cutting back to the digital equivalent which is a poorly formatted PDF :<(. The Detroit newspapers only publish 4 days a week. They stopped accepting letters to the editor. They couldn't be working any harder to drive people away.