Deep Impact

Ahhh yes, the Andrew Potter graph.

Thats ok, they must agree that "They didn't build that" anyway.

Obamba's got plenty of checks waiting for them, just like they insisted.

Always nice to read a feel good news story.

I'd love to see a Canadian version of that graph.

Proportionately, Canadians have greater access to Hi-speed internet service than do Americans.

Many Canadian newspaper editorials simply mimic whatever the NY Times and L.A. newspapers are touting. They are "snow-blind" to the approaching iceberg.

I have been a daily newspaper reader my entire life. I started with the Globe and Mail when I delivered it as a kid. When I lived in England I had a Telegraph subscription Later I worked in the finance industry and I started reading the Financial Post. That morphed into the National Post and I was a day one subscriber. I loved the National Post For about ten years, then it started to annoy me and I gave up my subscription about two months ago. For the first time in my life I don't read a daily newspaper. I don't miss it either. If they are loosing people like me they won't be in business much longer.

I think this will be the last decade for many media elements in our lives.

Newspapers have so far survived by endless cuts. So few people are now subscribing to newspapers that it could hit the wall and not allow for the infrastructure to remain in place to produce them altogether.

Same with television. On demand, Netflix, fragmented audiences....I think it's going to be over soon.

Our paper is for about 90% advertisers. I'll get back time!

Newspapers?

Yup. One of the brains over there(31 yrs in the biz),figures they can all be saved if they just started using modern software to capture their specific users,and start directing the ads towards them.Oh Yeah. And then put it behind a paywall!!! SIGH.....losing subscribers like Titanic lost passengers, and they figure they fix it all by making the user PAY to see their biased crap on the NET? When they don't pay for a dead tree version now?
Looks like "journalism" heading down the toilet started quite a while ago.

Even the Sun media newspapers are going to a paid model for their online news. You can read 20 premium news articles in a calender month and then have to pay for a subscription. So for me no more trips to the Calgary Sun site. I can get my Stampeders info elsewhere and the Flames aren't playing due to the strike and I can get their news elsewhere as well. As much a many of the Sun News people like Levant, Coren, Liley and Adler are very good, I prefer a written article that I can skim through over a video. Short and to the point is what I prefer.

mid island mike

A welcome litle ray of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy cultural atmosphere.

Sliver linings.

Dumped the local three years ago and WSJ about a year ago.

Dang! Newspapers are so nice and warm when you sleep in a park. Paper money will be worth just about as much in the future, but bills are too small to get wrapped around you.

The only time I have to deal with newspapers is when I dump out the free newspapers from my mailbox into the garbage saving a few for starting fires in my wood stove at this time of year. If something important happens, I'll hear about it from other people.

Advertising a product tells me that the product is something people don't need otherwise it would sell itself. For example, huge amounts of money are spent advertising soft drinks which primarily contribute to obesity and diabetes. There is no longer any cigarette advertising and people who need nicotine find cigarettes. Drug dealers don't advertise yet people have no problems finding their weed, coke or heroin.

Where advertising works is in highly specialized markets where companies will announce a new product and usually do so in a tiny print ad in a, to the general public, totally obscure magazine like Circuit Cellar Ink. Those are the ads that get me to buy previously unknown development boards based on the features of the device. More often than the ad, it's a review article about a product which makes me want one.

Amazon.com does targeted advertising but I find their ads are duds probably because I have such eclectic reading habits that they can't predict them. The best that they've been able to do is to suggest titles by the same author of a book I've ordered which I've already read. In more than 10 years of dealing with Amazon, the only ad of theirs that worked was the one for JJ Cale and Eric Clapton's collaborative CD which I immediately ordered.

With the ability to search the internet, people are finding out about products on their own. Advertising is something which will disappear as the population is no longer homogenous and people are actively looking for what they want rather than being in a low information situation where they are told what to want.

I have every ad blocker that's available and put new ones on my browsers all of the time. The more annoying and intrusive an ad, the exponentially less likely that I'm going to buy the product.

There's a certain serenity one attains from not being exposed to the noise of what is considered news. Was pondering today how many pathologies are caused by being a daily viewer of news when saw a patient of mine with PTSD who I thought was doing better but then she decompensated following watching endless coverage of the CT school shooting. She began to have nightmares again and getting her back to work seems tenuous now. When I suggested that she stop reading the newspaper, blow up her TV and turn off the radio she looked at me as if I was crazy. People seem to be hooked on a steady diet of bad news - perhaps it makes them feel that they're doing better than the people who just died in last nights highway pileup or burned to death in their house a couple of days ago. Unless it affects me personally, meaning that someone I know has died, I'm not interested.

I predict that decline of print media will inexorably continue and in several years time there will be new companies springing up to sell bird cage liner and fire starting paper.

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