when he’s on around the horn. i think he can be abrasive at times, but all in all, i think he’s a good columnist.

In his analysis of the newspaper business.

Printing out a centralized newspaper, loading it on trucks, and shipping it all over a city seems like a silly way of doing business in the internet age. Moving truckloads of paper isn’t particularly efficient, and, way back in the day, I was a paperboy, and my brother was a distributor, so I have a decent feel for distribution. Free distribution of content over the internet and selling ads online is likely to be more profitable than selling ads in papers, and charging for the papers. Most of the cost subscribers pay gets eaten up by printing and distribution anyway, so I could see how free distribution could be as profitable.

I used to receive the Morning News and the Times Herald. Now I get all my news online, or through TV or radio.

I’m not going to comment at length on the future of newspapers, but I will say that to say that “newspapers are simply refusing to radically adapt to the Internet” is just incorrect.

Anyways, very interesting from Deadspin:

According to two reliable sources, Mariotti, just back from Beijing, wanted to write a column on Barack Obama. But it wasn’t Jay’s turn to write — it was Rick Telander’s — and Telander also wanted to write on Obama. And we know how Mariotti feels about Rick. Sun-Times says no, Jay, wait your turn….

…And so Mariotti, showing the maturity he’s famous for, calmly assessed the situation and figured he was not going to let it bother him. Just kidding! He threw a fit worthy of a three-year-old. Then this bit of greatness: Mariotti resigned, and then headed to the Sun-Times office to tape his Around the Horn segment, only to find that his security pass had been deactivated while the paper was deciding whether or not to accept the resignation. They finally accepted it.

If true, it pretty much validates everything I think about Mariotti.

i will continue to not read that paper.

Have an early hand of newspaper content. Any lagging behind seems to be the fault of the newspaper itself. For instance, my customized yahoo page includes realtime subsection posting, with mouseover content segments, from the Fort Worth Star Telegram. I’m assuming the portal pays the paper for immediate content delivery, and advertisers pay the portal. In the past couple of days, I get virtually real time presentation of traffic, police cases, city info on any city in Tarrant County, and only need to click once to expand and article I may be interested in.

I haven’t had a printed newspaper subscription since 1993, and haven’t had one in my hands other than what may be lying around in a gate lounge at an airport since then, either. The supposed ‘subscriber demographic’ has never applied to me.

Well, I don’t know about “unique” but I work at a twice-weekly community newspaper doing sports. Ours is the type of paper that isn’t competing with the internet. People look to me for pictures and stories on their kids on the high school football team or basketball team or whatever. People look to my paper for things like a story today on a barbecue fundraiser for a local guy with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. Also, there are various things for which a legal notice must be run (foreclosures, fictitious business name statements, etc.) that we’re the paper of record for.

Advertising is tighter for us like for the industry as a whole, but our subscription rate is holding steady instead of dropping, whereas the large local daily is facing shrinking subscription rates as well as cutbacks in ad sales and is trying to get employees to accept buyouts and early retirements in hopes of avoiding another round of layoffs.

I asked for a pay raise a few months ago as my rent expenses went up, but I was turned down. Now I’m trying to move into a much less expensive place, even though it quintuples my daily commute, in order to live within my means. I think my job is pretty secure here, as I’m the only sports guy and the local sports are important to the readers.

So large metro daily papers might be a sinking ship, as they are in direct competition with TV and the internet, but community newspapers are still alive.

“Internet killed the newspaper columnists”

Gotta keep up with the times.