[Big Mac]

I would like to get opinions from members on their thoughts on print news media - how you interact with it, what role you think it should play, what the financial problems mean to its future and where things could be years from now. I'm focusing here on newspapers specifically, but feel free to add in comments about news magazines.

I decided to pose a series of questions below as an open invitation to discourse, which others can add to:

1. Do you still get a traditional newspaper on a routine basis, or do you get all your print news online? And how much print news do you consume compared to broadcast news?

2. What newspapers do you frequent, or alternatively, do you use an aggregator like Google News?

3. Do you find your local print media sources to be important enough to read on a regular basis, or are you mostly concerned with regional, national and international news?

4. How often do you feel that there's too much news out there and not enough time in the day to go through it?

5. Do you prefer to have your news articles displayed in a traditional newspaper printed format, do you prefer online format instead, or are you indifferent?

6. Are you concerned that any particular newspaper (or magazine) will go out of business?

7. Rupert Murdoch believes news should be paid for, and that's his strategy for the WSJ. Do you think that news will remain essentially free online to readers, or will paid news become more accepted? If you believe the latter, what funding strategies do you think will prove successful (micropayments, low-cost subscriptions, something else perhaps)?

8. Should a newspaper make clear distinctions between journalism and editorial content? Do you read newspaper content with an eye toward discerning potential partisan biases, or are you less concerned about biased coverage?

9. What role does blogging, informal news media and other forms of online "citizen journalism" play in your approach to the news? What about news posted on social networking sites or by way of microblogging (Twitter)?

10. What do you think the landscape of print media could look like in five to ten years from now?

[turtle777]

I don't think that good news will always be free.

I have a paid paper subscription to the WSJ.

Well, "paid" is not quite right, I get a 9 month subscription for 3,300 frequent flier miles. This is about the best bang for the frequent flier mile-buck that you can get. Even if you calculate the WSJ at a reduced subscription price of $ 60/year (regular is $ 120/year), it comes out to a mathematical 1.4 cents per freq. flier mile.
Anything better than 1 cent / mile is a good deal these days.

-t

[design219]

Five years ago I read the regional paper every day.

Now, if I'm having lunch alone and don't have any other reading material, I'll buy one... but this is only about 2-3 times a month.

I've gotten quite comfortable getting my news from the web.

[Thorzdad]

I haven't regularly read a local newspaper in 20 years or so. But, I've lived in/near Indianapolis and, if you've ever read the Indy Star and any of their satellite papers, you'd understand.

[ghporter]

I take my local daily newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News. While I specifically buy it for the comics (seriously), I do read quite a bit of it. I get a lot of important information from this paper, but I also despair at things like blatant typos the get by the editors of major wire services. I frequently see "filler" stories in the paper a day or so after I've read that same story on Yahoo! News.

I get most of my local news through the paper-local TV news is so tabloid as to be unfunny (and yes, I have compared ours with other locals and we still lose out). I also get regional and national news from the paper, and here I feel I get more depth and detail because I can lay out the paper and read these details at my leisure, while online news is often more severely edited for space.

I don't think there's "more news" out there than there was 50 years ago. I think there are more companies trying to make a buck off of selling news, and that has resulted in an avalanche of "news" that wouldn't have gotten past being published in a regional paper.

For me, reading text is reading text, though having the paper in my hands rather than text on a screen is more convenient for lengthy articles. I am sorry that San Antonio has been a single-paper town for a very long time, but there isn't any other publication that I'm worried about.

PRINTED news should be paid for. BROADCAST news not so much. And I consider the web "broadcast" in this sense. I'm willing to pay for services online that provide more than headlines (I consider what you get out of Yahoo! News and Google News to be pretty much just headlines), but I would not necessarily subscribe just for news. I already subscribe to a number of print journals to keep up with technical information, so a "news" subscription would have to be pretty special for me to be willing to pay.

"News" and "editorial" should ALWAYS be VERY clearly distinguished. A news story where the writer has to make or pass on assumptions about anything should very clearly identify these assumptions.

Blogging and Twitter can be useful-look at the uproar currently going on in Iran (and think about what was happening in Moscow 16 years ago, for that matter). But except for "this just in" reports, both should be considered "column" material, not news.

I couldn't guess at what print journalism will look like in two years, let alone five to ten years from now. I could not have predicted that my paper would both go from a fairly thick thing to really thin AND change to a narrower, shorter paper format (it's almost square when folded in half). I think that, to their detriment, papers will continue to shrink the comics, which will lead to loss of readership. Which the papers' owners and editors just won't get. Seriously on all counts. If papers started printing MORE comics and printed them as large as they were in 1980, I think readership would pick up, particularly if they did not raise subscription and single-issue rates.