Would you miss newspapers if they stopped publishing?
I might be sorry for starting this topic in the Talk of the Day. But we’ll see. I predict I will get a lot of people ranting about the “liberal bias” in the media. I’m hopeful that regardless of how you feel about the Post-Dispatch, you might appreciate the role newspapers try to play in our democracy and respond from that point of view.
But, as you have heard, the news out of the newspaper industry hasn’t been great lately.
- The Chicago Tribune’s parent Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy protection.
- The New York Times Company is borrowing about a quarter billion bucks against its new Manhattan building.
- The Detroit newspapers — The Free-Press and the News — might cut home delivery most days.
- The Christian Science Monitor has announced it will stop printing a print newspaper, just as the Capital Times in Madison, Wisc., has.
And those are just some of the relatively recent developments. My colleague, Erica Smith, has documented the loss of jobs at news organizations on her blog, Paper Cuts.
Now, if you’re here, reading this blog, it tells me that you care about news. Otherwise, you’d be wasting your time doing something else from your office computer right now. So is news important to you? Would you miss the newspaper if it stopped publishing?


Kurt is the director of social media for the Post-Dispatch, where he has worked since August 2002. He's been a journalist since 1982, covering municipal government, courts, education and two hurricanes as a reporter before becoming an editor.
I prefer the print edition of a newspaper. However, as this newspaper became more of an OPINION piece than NEWSpaper, I cancelled my subscription. Why PAY to read something I disagree with when I can skim for the real news online for free?
If this newspaper would concentrate on reporting facts and leave the lecturing and smug opinions out of it, I would most definitely resubscribe.