Does Anyone Else Miss the Local Newspaper?

Comment

Comment by Matt Theobald on March 6, 2008 at 3:03am

Brooks Publications runs a monthly Urban Times in downtown Indy which is the only local paper I read front to cover.

Comment by Lorraine Ball on March 4, 2008 at 4:36pm

The one thing the star has done is built out "News for You".. it is their take on the Free Press. The readily accept submissions from local citizens, and we have been able to get some nice visibility for clients with on-line sotries.

However, what we miss with the "Free Press" is the investigative reporting, and local editorial, opinions.

Maybe the Newspaper is going the way of the buggy whip.. and on-line news will be the medium of the future. If so, much like the newspaper, it won't be the subscriptions, but the advertisign that keeps the publications afloat.

Comment by Erik Deckers on March 4, 2008 at 3:58pm

Joh Patterson writes for the Muncie Free Press on occasion -- a local online paper. I think he said that Indy has one too. It may be that it's the small upstart papers that will start delivering our local news. How ripe is Indianapolis for a local content provider to compete with the Star? Would it be online only, or would it have a print component? If it's online, would people be willing to pay for it, when they can sort of get local news for free online?

Comment by Aaron M. Renn on March 4, 2008 at 3:39pm

The era when local newspapers were owned by local owners and operated as a business, a prestige operation, and a public trust are long over. Combine conglomerate ownership with trends in newspaper circulation, and you have a big recipe for cost cutting.

This month's Esquire had a great article by the Baltimore Sun guy who wrote Homicide and the Wire talking about the decline of that paper.

Even the NYT is not immune, with many staff reductions, and the Sulzbergers are under enormous pressure to boost returns.

Comment by Erik Deckers on March 4, 2008 at 2:51pm

This is why I only get my news through an RSS feed. They do publish local stories, but I don't want to spend $.50 a day to find them. I just get them online for free.

You can also get good local news with Ruth Holladay on her blog, RuthHolladay.com.

Comment by Lorraine Ball on March 4, 2008 at 2:47pm

And unfortunate! We have some great local writers, and I miss the perspective.

If I want bland, homoginzed news I can read USA Today. I subscribe to the local paper to get a sense of what is hot here.

I agree with Max, more and more, I turn to on-line sources, for news and views.

Comment by Steve Hall on March 4, 2008 at 2:34pm

As a former newspaperman, Gannett's cheapness never ceases to astound me. If the Star can pick up another paper's story and not send a writer, it will. I noticed that during the Kelvin Sampson controversy, some of the best stories with a Bloomington dateline in the Star were actually written by a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal. That's idiotic.

Comment by Max Robinson on March 4, 2008 at 2:22pm

The same thing has happened up here in Northwest Indiana with "The Times" since it was taken over by Lee Publications http://www.lee.net/

That is one of the reasons I love the net, the media lacks control over the information like they do with newspapers and television.

Call me a "conspiracy nut," I don't care, I believe my own eyes and instincts over what some corporate owned talking head tells me fron the idiot box or a pess release from a government agency.

Example: Listen to the news broadcast locally of the OKC bombing and 9/11. They mention multiple explosions. By the time they reach the national news level these references are gone.

Comment by Andrew Ball on March 4, 2008 at 8:52am

I made a prediction that with Gannett taking over, eventually the Star would become a mini-USA Today with a small section for local news and the remainder being a rehash of USA Today. Looks like that is happening.

After reviewing every page of yesterday's Star, I found that about 70% of the articles were drawn from the national press (Bloomberg, AP, etc.). Even the article on the NASCAR race was not written by one of the Star's local writers. Have they stopped sending reporters to the races? This was one of their stronger areas in the sports section. In the business section, the smaller blurbs were tagged lined "compiled from local and national sources" (paraphrased from memory). Most if not all of the blurbs were national which lead me to believe that the "local" was lip service...

While the Star may not have compared to the Washington Post or the NY Times, it was at least OUR paper written by OUR writers. I'm sorry to see the change.