until your home town team wins the World Series or the Super Bowl. Then everyone wants a commemorative copy of - what? A newspaper! The home town newspaper! The San Francisco Chronicle printed 90-100K extra copies today (on top of the usual 350K) and they’re still selling out.
I guess you could take a screen shot of a web site, but it just wouldn’t be the same, would it?
What are you gonna do when newspapers are gone, huh? You’ll pay a lot more than a buck for a commemorative something then, I’ll tell you.
pbpbpbpbbth! to newspaper naysayers everywhere.
Roddy
Seriously, newspapers are dying because they are losing their main revenue stream, which was not sales of printed copies but classified advertising. Services like Craig’s List and eBay are what are killing newspapers. And even if they bring out a special commemotative issue, the sales of extra copies isn’t going to help them much. They need advertising on their websites in order to survive.
Yes I do, but not because I thought they would ever be valuable (as you point out, everybody did it). No, I just thought if I were a kid and I knew my grandad was alive as long ago as the 20th century, I might think it cool to see the old newspapers from the turn of the millennium, back when you had to actually read them rather than have them downloaded straight to your neural implants.
At almost every estate sale around here, one can find a copy of the last edition of the Courier-Express, with the “Goodbye” headline. Apollo 11 and Kennedy assassination editions are also commonplace.
I do everything I can to support my local paper. So far that just amounts to have a daily, home-delivery subscription, but since they are owned by the Gannet group of newspapers, I think they have a little more breathing room than other small, local papers.
I would hate to see them go under. There really aren’t any other good sources for local news. Their website is ok but that seems to be some sort of collaborative effort and I don’t think it has all of the same stories as the print edition - but I would need to look into that.
The one think I don’t like is that to access the paper’s archives online you have to pay some ridiculous fee. I think they should give subscribers some sort of a break, but if helps keep them in business, I guess I don’t really object.
Newspapers all around the country are now seeing their hope in staying in business one more year is for their hometown team to win the World Series. :rolleyes:
Trust me an extra $250,000 dollars from selling one edition of the paper, is not going to keep most of these bags afloat.
Now if you had said that winning the world series allowed the Chronicle to sell a month’s worth of advertising…that would have been something.
Local, community weeklies are actually doing quite well for the most part. Mine is and I’m grateful for the support of the community. There’s nowhere else they’re going to find the photos and stories and reader contributions that we can allow and use in the paper 'cause we’re an independent. It’s just my business partner and me, and we can say “Yes” when we think it’s something that our readers would benefit from- either raising awareness, educating or entertaining. And we know our readers and they can talk to us and give us feedback and we listen.
And we don’t even have much of a website. We work long, hard hours to create a good local physical paper and people tell us all the time how much they look forward to Wednesday’s mail and how they take turns reading it or buy an extra copy so they can read it together on the weekends. There’s more shelf life and value in that and our advertisers recognize that and, in turn, support us.
Besides, it’s just not the same, taking a laptop into the bathroom for your early morning reading time…
Our local paper is responsible for the ouster of a corrupt sherrif, the re-inventing of our county government, the exposure of crooked public deals, the list goes on and on. I hope they never go under. A blogger from New York could never do the same job.