In a perfect world there would be 3 or 4 or more newspapers in every town — each with a different “slant.” That’s not an economic reality, however. If you don’t agree with the local paper (singular in almost all cities), you’re probably going to deem it wrong. That’s not usually the case. Often it’s just that it’s different. People with radical beliefs have trouble grasping this concept. If the RRS had, as you say, “slanted” the coverage to the far right, it’s quite unlikely that steelhawk would have written to complain.

Linda makes a valid point: newspapers aren’t unbiased now and they never have been (have you noticed that there are newspapers named the Star-Democrat, Republican-American, etc.). Most papers leave their political stance to the editorial page and to their columnists. Standard news coverage is as balanced as possible. In nearly 15 years in newsrooms, I never heard an editor suggest a story needed to have a different political bent.

Myself, I preferred it better when we had just plain reporters that would report the actual news rather than biased journalists that are hired only if they support the opinions of their publisher.

And they say that the internet is a cesspool of information. To me that just means the internet is a step above the printed media, Regardless of how they try to jusify their actions, the printed media is on the way out and deservedly so. The public deserves better.

Drew, you make many valid points, but I think you misunderstood my general premise. This misunderstanding also brought up a difference in our viewpoints. I work in the IT field as well ( I remotely manage business and governmental servers for a fortune 50 company), and we have an awful lot of outsourcing to India, especially first-level support when it is the middle of the night here. I have personally seen, and have been affected by, the loss of quality in support, not to mention communication difficulties, international personnel problems, etc. But that’s another point altogether.

I was not recommending removing local sources from the news business in any way. In fact, I would champion the conversion of local reporters from print to digital media. I do not see why the standards would change. Journalists would still go through all the same paces they do now, just the media itself would change. Perhaps this is naiveté on my part being ignorant of the inner working of the newspaper business. If so, perhaps Ms. Cunningham could explain?

I agree with you that the advertising issue is a real balancing act, but is it really any different from print? The Register Star could fill half their page space with adds to generate more revenue, but people will become annoyed at all the ads and circulation will decrease, thus causing revenue to decrease in the long run. Same problem with digital media. Lost of flashy ads will indeed annoy readers and cause them to move on to other sources. There are many ways to incorporate ads and ad revenue into your website without being too intrusive. A good webmaster will already know many of them. You mentioned Google’s ads, that’s one good example. Many people respond favorably to AdWords-type advertising (although I do not), banner ads, “Sponsored Links” like Google uses, a short ad before video feeds start, etc.

There are ways to do it, but I will admit that I do not know the economics side of it well enough to say if there will be enough revenue from these sources to offset the cost of the digital media, staff, etc.

In the meantime, these numbers just in from Deutsche Bank and the Audit Bureau of Circulation: The Rockford Register Star and rrstar.com reach 87.6 percent of all adults in the market — 71 percent are print only; the remainder are online only. That makes us number one in the country in combined reach, ahead of major players like the Washington Post.

Thanks, guys, for a great discussion!

I work for an IT outsourcing firm. A good portion of my fellow employees have been outsourced to India in recent years, and for good reason. Labor is cheap, and you very little degregation in service.

News doesn’t work this way. Try as you might, but information must be generated from local sources. There is no other option, its impossible to outsource. Quality writers will not write for free. They have mortgages, college loans, and children, and retirement to think of. Web sites with shoddy writing will simply not attract a large number readers. To provide a decent product you must have people of quality manufacturing or serving this product.

News web sites are still trying to figure out how come up with a financial model that provides a reliable revenue stream. But technology itself is sometimes an inhibitor. You don’t want to bombard readers with flashy advertisements. That only scares people away. I think this is why google ads have become so popular. They’re non-intrusive, yet provide ad content based upon the page you are viewing.

Most news agencies want to develop their site to become an “information portal” To do this you need to bring in feeds from other sources so end users have a singular place to retrieve information. (Such as careerbuilder.com and AP News) And yet RSS feeds (and other streaming technologies) allows readers to bypass these portals. But still SOMEONE has to pay for the writers.

I understand Linda’s pitch to help out local news by buying a print subscription, but this goes against the current trend of “going green.” So this puts newspapers in a tough bind. Some papers, like the wall street journal, require subscriptions to view certain online content. This might work on a larger scale in the future, but right now people are used to looking at news online for free. Its a tough sell.

So in reality, I have no idea how newspapers will evolve to be purely online. But evolve they must, and I think they will. But there is a long transition period. You said 5 years, Linda says more like 10 to 20. I’d have to say around 10 sounds right. There’s still a lot of dedicated people that like holding paper.

Also, since they can skip those steps, they can reduce costs dramatically, thus making them a little more appealing to some advertisers. Obviously, at this time print media still has some advantages. One of these advantages should not be underestimated, and that is the fact that reporters for mainstream media have the infrastructure and access that the newer web-media simply doesn’t have yet. They also have more “staying power” than current digital media. You can clip articles you like, reference then again later (which is not always easy on an online news source), pull out Tuesday’s paper again to look at a sale ad, etc. However, I do not think that it will take 10 or even 20 years for digital news to get there. I’m guessing (yes, it’s a guess) more like 5 years.

There are many advantages to web-media that print media simply cannot match. It gets delivered to me immediately, it can update and refresh through the day for current events in almost real-time, it can be accessed from any web-enabled device, it can actually notify me when it has something new on a story I am watching, it can change the layout or “feel” of the publication almost at will, it is cheaper, it is a lot easier to get accurate stats on how many readers you really have, etc.

To me, it seems like the venerable news infrastructure of yesterday (newspapers, nightly network news, etc) is in it’s death-throws. My hope is that the people with the reporting experience will embrace the new media before it’s too late and they get left behind. There are people with national and local bylines that do really good work that might miss out by not adjusting in time, and that would be a darned shame. I think that editors should be pushing for more and more web-integration into their work, and not hoping that a paper can hang on for 10 or 20 more years.

What is it they say? “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” In this case it’s more like “Lead, react and play catch-up, or die off.”