Makeover needed: Newspapers

Newspapers have articles with no substance and plenty of bias. Not just this, they are the equivalent of fast food. It's all prepackaged from Reuters or AP, rather than written and researched by and held accountable TO a specific person.

Local papers have very little local information and national papers are no more than a print version of the nightly news. And I can hear the nightly news while cleaning the kitchen after supper or while folding laundry. Why should I pay for something that ends up on the bottom of a bird cage or clogging up the landfill and killing trees...and giving me no value in the mean time. The only thing I like the local media for is the photographs. And they can be put on the internet and shared with the world.

i AGREE THAT THE NEWSPAPERS HAVE TURNED HIGHLY LIBERIAL. THIS LIBERIAL BIAS HAS SLOPPED OVER INTO THE COMICS ALSO.

THE PAPERS ALSO KEEP UP THEIR SUPPOSEDLY BALANCE BY RUNNING ANY GOOD LIBERIAL NEWS ON FRONT PAGE AND ANY GOOD CONSERATIVE NEWS ON PAGE 6 0F SECTION D.

THE TROUBLE WITH THE INTERNET IS THAT THERE ARE NO CONTROLLS OVER WHAT IS PRINTED. YOU CAN WRITE THAT THE CLOUDS ARE FALLING OUT OF THE SKY AND KILLING PEOPLE AND I GUARANTEE THAT IT WILL BE FORWARDED BY SOME PEOPLE THAT SWEAR THAT ITS THE TRUTH.

I use to work for the Charlotte Observer and their biggest problem during elections was trying to find one Republican candidate they could endorse so they could say they are unbiased. They would find some rural candidate running for dog catcher who is unopposed and tentively support him/her.

I stopped subscribing to the newspaper a long time ago. When they started reporting with their opinions and not using the facts, I don't to pay for someone's opinion, I want facts and truth !!! The newspapers all lie and they don't care if you know it. If it is a news story the paper supports, they can't read enough about it. These days ,I get all my news from cable news and the internet these days. I constanntly get calls from the newspaper to subscribe again, but I flatly refuse.

When one buys a newspaper they want to read the news in a shorter version instead of a story that is long and has a lot of the writers personal opinions even though hidden in it. The repeating of a story for a week or two is not a way to grasp America's attention as it gets boring, whether on page one or page six. The fact of better than half of the paper being ads is also increasingly boring, there is enough of that done on radio and televison and the internet.

There are always a transition...look at blogs.. We have some members that are in advertising on Myinvestorsplace.com...and they feel blog advertising or google adds are more effective and directed...
Could this be a reason newspapers have seen their zenith??

I have been working for a local newspaper for the last 21 years. The first Monday in October, (referred to as "Black Monday) we were ordered to a mandatory meeting. At this meeting the publisher dropped the "L" word. She informed us all, that 142 employees would be layed off in January. That comes out to about 40% of the employees.
Starting in January, all the departments took a cut. Half of our editorial staff are leaving. Some departments were eliminated completely.
So now I am reinventing myself to continue on.
I will be watching to see if they can succeed. The one thing in their favor is they also do commercial printing.

How about taking a page from the setup of a welcome mat type format and making it where people can have the choice of subscribing to just the portions of the paper they are actually interested in, i.e. sports or the comics or world news etc etc and having that arrive on your doorstep? Thus eliminating paper waste, wasted reading time, etc etc. You can run these with the obigatory advertising you expect in a Sunday paper.

i used to read the washington times but stopped because i was disgusted by the total bias of everything it prints even the classifides are right wing media bias. as long as newspapers like this and the chicago tribune and the others just print what rush says and every article is typical conservative media biased papers will fail. i get my news from a fair and balanced MSNBC, thank yyou
soryr i cant spell good.

It will be difficult to find something for my hands to do after many years of enjoying the morning news with my coffee. A concerned father taught me to read a nespaper every day, disemminate the information and make wisw choices. Since the Fourth Estate now behaves like the Oldest Profession I find my hands soiled with more than printers ink.

I'm not worried about a liberal slant, and don't find it really true. I think conservatives want it slanted their way actually, not the function of a newspaper.
What is wrong is the structure of a paper, and the editing, spelling, and grammar. It's just sloppy. Just because there are word processors and can cut and paste doesn't mean you don't have to pay attention to what you're writing, and check facts. And please stop moving sections around and make it easy to find and read items. News in the news section, local, garden, sports, etc. all in their place. It's not an Easter egg hunt, and we all just want the facts - you know, who, what, where, why, and when - in a readable form.
Internet coverage is a combination of gossip, news, and just plain filler... articles change from hour to hour, and stories seem to be picked up elsewhere so fact checking falls by the wayside. TV news has become infotainment, and I tend to like the BBC better than most news programs. Don't even get me started on the talking heads type shows. They seem happier now that Obama is in and they have something different to talk about, something real like what's going to change and will it work, so I guess it's just been stale and the same old stuff - but I thought it seemed like they didn't even have a clue about things in the real world.

I hear conservatives saying the news has a liberal bias, but I think it's not that. It's the lack of editing, from the choice / placement of articles to the actual writing - spelling, grammar, and clarity of the articles. Covering the facts - who, what, where, when and why - and doing so in a concise manner so we get a complete picture without having to figure out things like who the person just quoted is because their name was edited out earlier in the article along with what actually happened and where because they were edited out too... huh? I'm sure we've all had that experience.
Actually, we get the paper for the crossword / puzzles / advice columnist and would also like to get the complete story on the snippets we've seen on the news and internet. I think that's the function of a paper, and to have it well and concisely written would certainly be a bonus.

Dear Friend, Your article is all wrong, a typical Leftist rant about how hard the writer's life is, what a VICTIM the writer is. Imagine being interrupted from reading the Times to read to a child. Shocking! The real reason newspapers are dropping like flies in a freeze is that THEY ARE SO LEFTIST THAT THE REAL WORLD DOESN'T FIND THEM CREDIBLE AND HAS LOST INTEREST IN READING ALL THE PRO DEMOCTAT PR. The print media is so boring, like the times, all HATE BUSH, love the Left. A typical Times story is "World to end tomorrow, all will perish, women and minorities hardest hit." Today the story is "African resource rich countries doomed because of too much natural resources." Tomorrow it will be "African countries doomed because of poverty." Actually it appears that African countries are doomed to violence and poverty because they are run by Africans, but the Times is not interested in covering that politically incorrect angle. The sooner all the newspapers collapse and the Lib (so called) journalists lose their jobs, the better for America.

After what he news media did to the election coverage, it is no wonder they are failing. I have lost my confidence in american journalism. The grammar is bad, the spelling is horrible. There are more sale ads than articles and most of those are biased anyway. They feed the people only the information they allow us to have.

I was trained in the "old-school" world of journalism where you needed two references on the record to print a certain viewpoint. Now anyone can write an article with no attribution for any "facts" stated. Papers will not crack down on their slack rules because they think it sells papers. Truth and balanced "reporting" wins readership. Present the facts and let the readers decide.
I've been out of the business for 12 years now, and I truly feel papers will be all electronic sooner rather than later. With electronic gathering tools as RSS and other automatic feeds, I now get updated news and sports from the topics I want to get. Wise up papers before you are all dead.

Here are my choices for Newspaper reading the NY metro area:

NY Times: A blantely liberal tabloid trash rag

NY Post: A blatnely conservative tabloid Trash Rag

NY Daily News: A tabloid trash rag

All in all nothing but tabloids with an adgenda being either left or right. Also these paper are rather devoid of local news coverage, which to me is the biggest reason why I do not read any of these papers. Yes national news is important, but I also like to know what is going on in my local government, sports and entertainment. If all I wanted was national stories then I will just flip on my TV and watch a 24 hour news network.