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. 
crashtest-The Post-Dispatch have provided us with a red/blue “newspaper”,and its right here at our finger tips.This website gave all people the chanch to gave many diffrent and diverse opinions.The future is here,and now.
………….Steve M…..I agree with you thaqt STLTODAY is more or less the Red-Blue idea.
My thought though, is that if the “print” edition is to have any chance of surviving (I do not want to see more people unemployed) the print edition has to do something to rekindle interest in itself.
That is the only reason I suggested my Blue-Edition/ Red-Edition idea….is to sell the “printed” Post Dispatch, and keep people employed.
I feel 100% certain that if the print edition keeps on with the same old “don’t let the door hit you on the butt if you dont like it” format it will be a just a matter of time before it is gone.
I get most information/news from the internet/tv…sorry. Once in a while we buy a newspaper…mostly for the ads/coupons and sports information.
I feel a deep sense of sympathy for people who think that all of the media has a liberal bias. They don’t realize that it’s just reported, written, and produced by people who are more intelligent than they are and possess and a more informed world view than they do.
Oh, a positive article about Barack HUSSEIN Obama? The Post-Dispatch is a bunch of communists!
An article that portrays the Iraq War in a negative light??? I’m going back to the O’Reilly Factor where the news in unbiased!
Get over it.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-onthemedia27-2008jul27,0,6802141.story
I am astonished at the large number of people who are commenting on this post about how much they hate the Post Dispatch. Why are you here, then? I am not trying to suggest anyone is unwelcome, I just don’t understand why people would come to a website just to complain about it.
That said, I would not miss the paper at all if it stopped publishing, but I would be lost without this website. I don’t get the paper at home for several reasons, but I am on here multiple times a day. It seems to me that your questions are unrelated–yes, news is important to me, no, I wouldn’t miss the paper if it stopped publishing in print. In fact, news being important to me is one reason why I prefer online, where you can easily find different viewpoints on the same news item.
I cancelled my subscription to the PD on July 17, 1996. The day the PD reported that TWA Flt#800 was shot down by a US Navy Jet. It was then that I appreciated that the PD was more of a tabloid, than a reliable news source.