by vee-kay | 2026-01-25 05:14:29+00:00
>The problem is that your local paper can’t match the product that the internet makes available.

The reverse is true actually.

Print-edition newspaper or magazines had better quality of content than online sites or blogs.

But they eventually deteriorated as the consumer market shifted to online.

Most newspaper subscribers canceled their subscription, but it was not because newspaper couldn't match some quality of content. It was because the way we consumed news changed.

Newspapers and Magazines went from content-heavy editions with ads sprinkled in, to ads-heavy editions with (mostly meaningless) content sprinkled in.

There were 3 reasons for this trend worldwide:
1. Google News proved that news can be consolidated from many sources and provided as easy headlines with short summaries linking to fast-loading Google cached (copy of) pages of actual news sites. So people bookmarked Google News as a favorite (and some intrepid power-users even built feeds that could filter Google News to fetch exact types of content they were interested in), as they found that Google News is timely and topical (whereas in the era of such internet-based news and satellite-TV-channel-based news, the newspaper news was already stale).
2. Google Adsense allowed anya website to show ads for some money in return. Advertisers worldwide realised it was more lucrative to integrate into this internet-driven ecosystem for page-views-based ads that could potentially reach millions of users (and every ad clicked could be tracked, hence ad analytics also came to the for3), than to rely on delayed revenue from ads in printed newspapers or magazines which reached only few thousand subscribers.
(Soon rivals to Google News and Google Adsense came to the market, and they too did their best to woo away consumers and content providers.)
3. Apple's pioneering iPhone and iPad ushered in the new era of smarter snazzier powerful smartphones which were better suited for content consumption.

To keep the advertisers somewhat happy, the newspapers and magazines reduced content and drastically increased advertisements in their print editions.

Online newspaper editions which were free or non-existent earlier, went to subscription model, citing server & infrastructure costs. But the real reason for such gatewalling by the news studios was to prevent the bots of Google, Microsoft, etc., from scraping their researched news and content from their sites.

Seeing the popularity of automated Google News and how it had been "borrowing" their content without paying, the news editors also started "borrowing" news and content from Google News and such automated online feeds.

So eventually, all the news headlines and their content online started looking similar (compounded by smaller news studios going out of business unable to meet rising costs due to reduced subscribers, and those smaller businesses were gobbled up by bigger conglomerates, which simply syndicated the popular news everywhere).

None of my friends or relatives get print newspapers daily. We all cancelled those subscription long ago, because those daily editions were no longer worth even the cheap money they used to cost.

One sad result of such online trends, is that previous famous good-quality and affordable magazines like Reader's Digest, have become scanty content interspersed with too many full page ads. It simply ain't worth it to buy RD anymore. I love reading high-quality magazines like NatGeo, it is just thrilling to hold them in my hands, fluck through their thick pages, see those beautiful/interesting photos and read the deeply researche content. And I used to get these high-quality magazines at low price by buying them from old books shops.

Such drastic shift from print-to-online have seemingly decimated the old-books shops and small-scale lending-libraries, that used to sell/lend old books and magazines at cheap rates. I hardly see such options in my city anymore (they have become few and far between).

Meanwhile, large-scale bookshops and government-funded libraries are doing decent business as parents and teachers are trying to coax kids into reading books and magazines.

As for classifieds, I feel that even that is a dying trend, even online. People no longer want to know or care who died in the community, as they don't even know who lives in the neighbourhood. They no longer buy used products anymore. They prefer it buy it brand new. Because China's mass-manufacturing made goods cheap (at a lower quality). So if someone wants a laptop, they just buy it new, they don't scour the classifieds to see who's selling their laptop at a bargain.

I think even the nice initiatives ike "yard sale", "flea market" or "farmer's market" are on the wane.

I think online time has made humanity to have become more closed and greedy & materialistic, rather than outgoing and ready to embrace new ideas or ready to reuse the old products.