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If no one is willing to pay for these publications or have time to read them, where will we get the valuable information, investigations and insight in the future. We are setting up a scenario where the scammers will have free reign.
I’m in a similar mode. On daily newspapers, I can usually get the same information for free on the internet. (The WSJ is the possible exception.) For weeklies or longer, their timeliness just isn’t there in the Internet era. If they were smart, they could provide added value through research and analysis–even to the point of being nearly academic–but they just can’t/won’t make that reach. I’d probably read that. With either, I find that simple Internet software obliterates most of the advertising that so overwhelms print publications.
Free and timely is better, especially in the absence of value-added insightfulness.
i’m lapsing all publications (wsj,u.s. news&world, newsweek, local daily as well as the smithsonian, atlantic, auduvon, scientific american and a couple others) and keeping the economist. i read nytimes, washpost, latimes, and christian science monitor online.
larster (no. 1 comment today) has a great point: what’s the news business going to do in the age of internet?
certainly, news will survive. it is a commodity; a commodity that exists in every culture. it does not have to be nurtured, merely harvested. (and, speaking from 36 years’ experience as a newspaper editor, it should not be watered, pruned or otherwise tampered with. merely harvest the commodity.
but it is the delivery that will evolve along the same lines that news evolved from person-to-person passage, to chiseling letters on stone, to the gutenberg press, to hot type, to cold type and on and on to the internet.
not to worry. somebody will always find a way to harvest and deliver my news commodity. after that, the ball’s in my court.
David, you should subscribe to the Financial Times, which continues to inform and improve my investment performance every day. I especially like getting an “across the Pond” perspective — the WSJ is just too Ameri-centric. All the FT content is online, but behind the $ub$cription wall.