Here in Kansas City we have the Kansas City Star. Its been going down hill for years. Currently it costs $2.50 per issue and its maybe 12 pages or so and printing is actually done in Des Moisnes Iowa now. I rarely get to read it anymore. Sometimes someone will leave a copy in the work breakroom. I stopped subscribing maybe 10 years ago. Today I got to read a copy at a friends house and I thought about how much I missed reading the newspaper. I love the printed word vs seeing it on a screen. I also miss the daily comics and the crosswords which frankly were about the only good parts left.
So I’d like to ask, does your home town/city still have a daily newspaper? How much does it cost and how good is it?
Yes. It costs $2 and I enjoy it with breakfast. Unfortunately it is largely edited in Toronto, although with a section devoted to Montreal news. For real news I subscribe to the NY Times which, delivered, costs $5.29 on weekdays and 11.04 Sundays. That's in CA, so about 3/4 of that price. I guess I could get a much cheaper online sub, but it is a luxury to get the print edition.
Yes, it’s free, and you have to pick it up at one of hundred or so retail locations. I don’t know, maybe you could pay them to mail it you, don’t know anybody who does that. They have extended to several other editions in nearby towns.
There isn’t much content, a few public notices about local events like something happening at the library, occasionally a story about a local person, business, or organization. Advertising for local retail stores, apartment rentals, local classified stuff, it’s a pretty good local restaurant guide. I think they’ll publish just about anything you provide as long as there’s some reason to believe someone will read it, and they have some space left. When we first moved here it was a good way to keep up on local news, the conventional newspapers for nearby cities might or might not cover our local town news. Now there’s nothing there that isn’t online somewhere. I think maybe it’s picked up a little popularity this year as people are in less contact to just catch up on what’s happening around town.
The Folsom Telegraph went to a free, ad supported model several years ago. It doesn’t have all that much content like TriPolar’s paper – maybe a few stories about local events, ads for local businesses, classified ads and public notices, a sports pages that mainly covers local high school games.
I subscribe to the Seattle Times, weekends only. Cost me $68 every 6 months. The Saturday paper rarely gets read, it’s usually only 16 or so pages and there is very little breaking news in it. Sunday is a lot bigger with 4 sections, color comics, 2 weekly magazines and all the sale papers. I generally read this paper front to back in about an hour so so. When I retired last month my wife and I sat down and went through all our expenses and decided those we really don’t need anymore. The paper went the way of our lawn mowing and window cleaning services. I’m still going to maintain my online account with the paper, that will cost me only $2 a month and I get 90% of the print edition. This is 7 days a week, not just weekends too.
We have a daily paper in Tucson, the Arizona Daily Star, which publishes 7 days a week. It costs $30.00 a month, which includes a digital edition you can download.
Chicago still has two major daily papers: the Tribune and the Sun-Times. A subscription to the Tribune costs $5.99 a week; I think that the daily (Mon-Sat) has a newsstand price of $1.50, and the Sunday edition is like $3.99. I subscribe to the Trib, as I have since I moved to Chicago in 1989; its reporting is still pretty good (especially its investigative and sports journalism), though it’s definitely thinner than it used to be.
The Sun-Times (which, coincidentally, owns the Dope) has been struggling for many years, but seems to still be hanging on by the skin of its teeth. I haven’t looked at a copy of the Sun-Times in many years, so I can’t comment on its current quality.
Chicago also has the Daily Herald, which is more focused on the suburbs, and the Defender, an African-American paper, which went to online-only last year.
By comparison, in my hometown of Green Bay, there’s one newspaper, the Green Bay Press-Gazette. It’s been owned by Gannett for decades, and from what I see when I visit my parents (or when I read the online version), it’s a shell of what it once was. It’s now a very thin paper except for the Sunday ad circulars, and little of their content (other than Packers news) is written locally – they rely on the bigger Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and national Gannett reporting, for a lot of their stories, other than the really local stuff.
Not only do we have a weekly paper here in my town of 6,000, I am one of the copy editors and proofreaders. A copy will cost you a buck. It’s a tabloid and runs anywhere from 12 to 30 pages (the latter when it’s town meeting time).
They used to have a local Newspaper the Overland Park Sun but that went under. I get a local Shawnee times online which has all the local news. Kansas City used to have these free weekly alternative papers which are kind of like New Yorks “Village Voice” but those all went digital. There is a still a black owned paper called “The Call”.
The friend who still the Kansas city Star also gets the New York times and the Wall Street Journal.
Schenectady is big enough to support a newspaper, The Schenectady Gazette. Not sure of its price, but I think it’s $1.25 for weekdays and $2.50 for Sunday.
My old home town has a weekly paper, The Suffolk Times, that seems to be doing just fine. There is also a tourist newspaper, Dan’s Paper that is distributed free in the summer. That serves a real purpose: there are a lot of people who come out for the summer and want to know about restaurants and other things to do, so there’s plenty of ads.
We have the City Paper, which is free. It’s usually got interesting original articles, but it’s still a lot of syndicated content and ads. It’s mostly useful for the classified section.
There’s other papers in town too of course, like the Washington Times and a bunch of smaller rags, but the Washington Post is such a behemoth it totally dominates the region.
We used to have a large set of hyper-local newspapers serving 3 adjacent suburban Maryland counties all called The [insert city/town/neighborhood name] Gazette. I believe it did have a price printed on it, but as far as I could ever tell, nobody actually had a subscription and they’d drop one on your driveway every single week for free. Eventually the parent company of all of them was bought by the Washington Post, who shut them all down a few years after that. It was a good little newspaper. For the most part they were clearly just a step above a high school or college newspaper, but it provided a job and experience for young journalists, and they seemed to try really hard to put out a decent product. And again, really useful classified section.
I keep bringing up the classifieds because while that section of the Washington Post is vast, it covers so huge an area it’s basically useless. I’ve never found anything good in there. On the other hand, I’ve always found useful stuff in the classifieds of the local papers. I found my first car and my first job with the local papers where the Post had utterly failed me.
After seeing this thread, I surfed over to the website of our local/regional newspaper, and they were offering a “Black Friday” sale - an unlimited digital subscription for one year for $20. So we are now subscribers.
Maybe they’re trying for a circulation boost in advance of the Xmas holiday.
Depends on what you mean by “local”. I suppose there are still Detroit papers, but their main presence now is presumably online. I don’t know, I haven’t read a Detroit paper in over a decade. They presumably still charge you something for a physical copy, but I couldn’t say what.
There is also a local paper for our corner of suburbia that gets delivered with the mail though, and thus it’s free.
There’s also the Boston Weekly Dig, a free paper that took over from the now-defunct Phoenix.
More locally, on Boston’s North shore, several towns still have local papers, including the Saugus Advertiser (weekly), the Lynn Daily Item, and the Salem News. I subscribe to the Saugus paper, but don’t recall the cost of an issue. All of these papers still have some heft, coming in more than once section (unlike my hometown paper in New Jersey, which shrank to pamphlet size before expiring).
Local weekly, $40 a year paper, probably includes online, I don’t check their online that often. Not-quite-so-local-but-close daily (well, 6 days a week) $200 / year paper includes online. Both do some actual local reporting; neither of them carries much out-of-area news, that I get online.
I have uses for the paper (lining cat carriers, firestarter, washing windows, etc.) though admittedly I could probably manage them some other way for less than $240. But it’s good to read something over meals that I can actually be done reading. There’s an end to a physical paper; there’s no end to the net.
Another area paper, which I don’t usually get, was just sold out to somebody. Their weekly advertiser, which I do get, is free, but doesn’t have much in it but ads; the daily version did have reporting, but apparently has less of it now.
Toledo still has the Blade, “one of America’s Great Newspapers”. This was spoofed by National Lampoon as “One of America’s Newspapers”. It’s OK, does a good job with local stuff and largely gets national stuff off the wire. It only publishes a Hard copy three days a week, the rest of the time it’s online. The online subscription is free to hard copy subscribers, though. Their editorial slant is rightist, and it sometimes bleeds over to the news part.