šŸŒŽ Bham/Mobile/Huntsville Newspapers all end print versions

It Takes Eleven

It Takes Eleven

Quoth the Raven...
Staff
rocknthefreeworld said:
Print is dead. Has been for a while. What is going to be worse is that they are going to wind up putting everything behind a paywall at some point, not even allowing x per month or the like.
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"My, how the times have changed."

I thought about sharing this story last week.

A friend of mine was in the hospital last week. I shot him a text as we all would do and asked if there was anything I could bring him. He had two requests.

The first made a lot of sense; he wanted a few cans of Ginger Ale. I got that...you know how hospitals work; a little 10 oz cup that takes hours to get a refill. So, bought him a six pack, right?

The second request threw me for a loop. He said, "bring Ginger Ale and paper." What was my first question? "Doesn't the nurses station have paper you can use? They've got printers all over the place, just grab a sheet or two."

It never dawned on me he wanted a newspaper. That's how much the times have changed.
 
When I was young, we had two newspapers in town. One was morning and one was afternoon. They covered a lot of the same stuff, but each had headlines from different times really. The morning one covered from around 10AM to around 10 PM the previous day. The afternoon one covered the 10PM-10AM time for primary headlines. Weekends they ran a combined issue but that was fine. They were Pulitzer prize winning papers (one was for coverage of the Phenix City situation in the 1950's even prior to the assassination of Patterson) and it showed in how they covered things.

Sometime in the 1980s they combined into one daily. Still pretty good and published in town with local staff.

Then the 1990's came. Printing moved to Montgomery I believe. But we still had mostly local staff and editors who actually created the paper, they just had an earlier time to submit their final to be printed. Reporting suffered but only in timing.

Then the 2000's hit and staff became less and less local. More and more of the paper was ads and wire, Less and less local editorials and reporting. More and more junk. But they still did provide information and follow-up on things.

The 2010's brought the closure of the primary local office, a beautiful building that the local college took over now. They have a small office with a couple of reporters who don't seem to really do much. The paper is smaller, and it is usually days late. The information provided is bare minimum with little follow-up. Worse, the website requires payment to read most anything and it is also not providing information.

At this point, I don't even consider our paper local or beneficial to anyone. I often get into arguments with the one local reporter I know of because I feel that way. But it really is mostly AP stories and very little real local coverage. The local stuff reads often like someone from Montgomery wrote it without ever visiting here.
 
You're right, @rocknthefreeworld many of the current papers rely heavily on newswire stories, and remotely written stories that were a necessity during the pandemic are now commonplace. I even see it these days with some WSJ articles.

The Bham papers for many years were the Post-Herald (traditionally the morning paper - switched with Bham News once they bought them) and the afternoon paper traditionally was the News. When he retired, my grandfather was the transportation manager for the News' trucking service, Mercury Express. They hauled in newsprint and distributed the papers to drop points for the routes. The Post-Herald was the liberal editorialists and the News was more conservative.
 
It Takes Eleven said:
You're right, @rocknthefreeworld many of the current papers rely heavily on newswire stories, and remotely written stories that were a necessity during the pandemic are now commonplace. I even see it these days with some WSJ articles.

The Bham papers for many years were the Post-Herald (traditionally the morning paper - switched with Bham News once they bought them) and the afternoon paper traditionally was the News. When he retired, my grandfather was the transportation manager for the News' trucking service, Mercury Express. They hauled in newsprint and distributed the papers to drop points for the routes. The Post-Herald was the liberal editorialists and the News was more conservative.
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At least they use some actual reporting.
Watch the local TV ā€œnewsā€ tonight. Most of the reporting is from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube , or Tik-Tok. The only thing on the ā€œnewsā€ that is generated now is traffic & weather.
 
rocknthefreeworld said:
I used to love to do so, until they turned into 3 day old garbage info with more ads than news.
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alabama mike said:
There is just something neat about holding your newspaper in your hand and reading it daily.
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I remember the sales pitch that USA Today used back in the mid 80's when they had telemarketers selling subscriptions...

"It's in color, and you can hold the paper and not get the ink on your hands." All true, and it sold me at the time.
 
TerryP said:
One of the best inventions out there for grilling/smoking.

Amazon product ASIN B07TM721ZS
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...I used to use 2 or 3 pages from those little local county newspapers they throw in your yard each week to wad up and stick in the bottom of the chimneys to light them.

Last couple of years though I've been using the Weber cubes you can get from Walmart. No muss, no fuss. It lights no matter what. Leaves no off taste and is very "localized" - good for starting the end of a charcoal snake for slow cooking.....and you don't have to then transfer from chimney to grill.

Still got my chimney for a backup though.

1668438186489.png
 
RollllTide! said:
I use a chimney to light my coals. I was making a joke about newspapers. I use half of a brown paper bag. It works great.
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I'm sure burning newsprint with your coals probably gives you cancer or something. I dunno. If so, I guess I can add burnt newspaper ink to the long list of possible carcinogens that'll get me one day. But i did use those free local papers they toss in the yard. Heck, I've used just about anything that'll burn to get the chimney started - including the thick paper charcoal bags and even 9x11 printer paper one time. Not recommending it. Just sayin' - ya do what ya gotta do.
 
It sucks - especially for me - but the only people that want the print edition now are older folks, parents (of athletes or any parents that kids that in the paper for whatever reason) and anyone that does something that's covered so they can hang it or something along those lines. We still print twice a week (Wednesday and Saturday) and do E-Editions (it's the same exact thing but in a PDF that goes to your E-Mail) Tuesday through Saturday. You would be surprised how far behind many people that advertise are on that, though. Our sales people can show people that 10 times the amount of eyes are on the website/social media but they still would rather by an advertisement in the print edition. The hardest thing with going to full on digital only is re-training people to be willing to spend money on something they feel entitled to have free. I cannot count the amount of times someone will complain that their weekly 3 stories ran out, so they can't see anymore. It's just not "fair" that they be asked to pay for something they want to read.
 
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