Newspapers echoing the net?

Hampton Roads, Local 1 Minute

Saw this letter to the editor in Wednesday’s Virginian Pilot in which the writer says that part of the reason for newspapers’ decline in circulation is that they are “echoing the internet:”

So you would think that newspapers would play to their unique capacity to do long-form, intense reporting and analysis about local issues, something the Internet struggles to provide. Instead, symptomatic of this preoccupation with technology, newspapers increasingly try to ape the Internet. Shorter stories. Lots of photos and images. Bullet-point ‘news bites.’ Even inserting bloggers into editorials and stories!

Obviously, I don’t see anything wrong with bloggers being included in the editorials and stories 😉 However, letter writer Burton St. John III said something pretty close to what I said earlier: newspapers need to concentrate on local stuff. Truth be told, what other source of local news is there? Word of mouth?

Published

9 thoughts on “Newspapers echoing the net?”

  2. If newspapers were truly local, we’d see the Admirals on the front page of Sports and the Redskins in a capsule summary on page 7.

    I think the newspaper would like to cover local politics, but 90% of local government is zoning for a day care or a variance for a fence. It’s not real exciting.

    Heck, even during the campaign, a local campaign is lucky to get a story every couple of months, but I bet there wasn’t a newspaper from August to November that didn’t have a Presidential campaign story.

    Newspapers are scared to death to be niche marketing. They still want to be MASS MEDIA, meaning mass advertising revenue.

    But they give me one of life’s thrills – the irony of seeing pro-environmentalist editorial boards get paid to go through so many trees and ink and fill landfills.

  3. Ah, radio. Hadn’t thought about that. But then again, I’ve listened to more radio since I got Sirius in my car than I ever listened to when I had regular radio. Oh wait- that’s NATIONAL radio that I’m listening to 🙂

    Would it be such a bad thing, Brian, to have the Admirals on the front page? I don’t think so.

    And all the angst over VB considering the move back to May elections – if the newspaper had been covering the local races (as opposed to the occasional story), wouldn’t that have blown away the argument about low-information voters participating?

  5. In Europe newspapers are something healthier because they adopted smaller sizes, like the Berliner and the tabloid. It´s easier to handle, you can read the newspaper while exercising at the gym, while the riding the train or while lunching. Even newspapers of record like El Pais and Le Monde are published in smaller sizes. Considering rare exceptions(NY Post, Chicago Sun-Times, NY Daily News, Newsday) ALL newspapers in the United States are published in the broadsheet format, a terrible format if you want to read the newspaper while you are outside your home.

    And most European newspapers have extremely good websites while most of the American ones have the poorest websites possible.

  6. I, for one, would LOVE to read more about the Admirals.

    And it’s kind of frightening, but 80% of what I know about what’s going on in Norfolk and Virginia Beach comes through word of mouth. It’s helpful if you know the right people, I guess. Hmm. Maybe I should start a newspaper.

  7. i must admit, that i get a lot of local news from blogs. But that has its own pitfalls. You have to find a blogger that focuses on the area you’re interested in. You have to sort through the blogger’s biases. And what happens if Vivian gets burned out on politics, and turns vivianpaige.com into a sewing blog?

  8. (sorry, hit the post button accidentally)

    It would be nice to have the newspaper as a reliably consistent reporter of local news and sports, with more in-depth reporting on the stories that warrant them.

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