Hard News

There was an interesting piece in the Washington Post this week on the future of the newspaper business:

“The venerable newspaper is in trouble. Under sustained assault from cable television, the Internet, all-news radio and lifestyles so cram-packed they leave little time for the daily paper, the industry is struggling to remake itself.”

And then later on…

“Print is dead,” Sports Illustrated President John Squires told a room full of newspaper and magazine circulation executives at a conference in Toronto in November. His advice? “Get over it,” meaning publishers should stop trying to save their ink-on-paper product and focus on electronic delivery of their journalism.”

My wife and I just cancelled our newspaper subscription this week. I had wanted to do that for a long time, but she persisted that it was worth the $25 per month. I’ve been reading news in my aggregator for a long time but occasionally picked up the paper if it was laying around. For the past year, I knew more and more of the stories that were printed AND had more information about those stories that I could relay to my wife. I think she got the point and made the unsubscribe call.

The next step in my master plan? Get her set up with an aggregator…