Most ads you can view on the store’s website, but you just can’t get coupons online. My coupon habit is small and limited to Sunday-only papers and the rest is recycled. It’s really the least cluttery thing I think I own/do.

Whoa. I actually work at a daily newspaper as a photographer and cannot think of a worse bit of advice to give your readers from my standpoint. The direct effect of many people switching to online only can be quickly seen here, http://www.penpressclub.org/ , with report of layoff after layoff at many major metros.

This backlash of laysoffs I believe came about by the newspapers offering for free online what they charged for in print. As you pointed out, many readers are starting to change to online service that gets them the paper for free. This in return makes papers charge, cut back, or stop offering the online service at all in an effort to retain readership. The effort to retain readership is paramount because advertising is directly related to circulation, which translates into advertising dollars.

As noted, a newspaper’s primary income is from Advertising and Classifieds. The rate a paper charges for Advertising and Classified is directly related to the ammount of circulation a paper has in a particular market. Less circulation, less money for advertising, because advertisers pay for the ammount of eyeballs they capture.

I agree with Warren Buffet … “… the days of lush profits from our newspaper are over.” The amount of profit made by newspapers was quite high, much higher than the average corporations of their size. And as you have pointed “Warren Buffet continues to own the news organization because he believes that ‘ … a free and energetic press is a key ingredient for maintaining a great democracy.’” This is an attitude that can be seen in many family owned papers. Yet if you work for a publicly owned chain who’s goal is to keep stock prices up, they end up making cuts to at the very least keep the status quo. A loss in profit, even if it means bringing the profit margin down to a more reasonable level means a loss in stock price, which investors are not willing to accept. This results in job cuts, and a loss of talent that you get the newspaper for. There is a more comprehensive breakdown that can be seen here in part 3 of the report: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/

This is mostly a rehash of what Lori said, but it needs to be re-said none the less. I encourage you to support your paper while it figures out a model that can best make use of the new technologies that have come out in recent years, and you can best do that by buying a paper. There are other, clutterless ways to deal with the paper and help keep your reporters/photographers employed and doing good work.

Can’t get them anywhere other than the Sunday paper. As far as I know that is…

1. A newspaper’s main objective (as noted above) is generating revenues through advertising. With up to half of the space dedicated to advertising, much of which is aimed at getting people to buy MORE newspapers, the damage to the environment continues to grow.

2. While paper recycling sounds great and beneficial and green, the process requires a massive quantity of water, so while we may be saving trees, we’re drying out water resources in the process.

Though I do read the newspaper online, I don’t do it quite so thoroughly as I did when I had the print edition, and frankly, living where I live, I’m feeling a great deal of relief knowing less about what is going on.

I love being paperless!

If a freelancer has written a story for a newspaper or magazine, it may not appear online or in a database paid for by your library. Why not? Check out the Tasini Decision: http://www.law.duke.edu/journa.....r0025.html

Essentially, some newspapers may not have the rights to take a story from their print edition and run it in their online edition.

And to stem the tide of declining print subscriptions, some newspapers may purposefully not put all content online.

Now, I do wholeheartedly believe in Peter Walsh’s statement that you should not have more than two unread back issues of periodicals lurking around. If I can’t read a paper by the second day I’ve had it, off to the recycling bin it goes.

If I’ve read it, I leave it in a cafe or near the free paper stand near my cafeteria at work and let someone else enjoy it.

The Rocky Mountain News is only $2 a months in electronic form and I can download a PDF version to read wherever and whenever I want.

This is quite common in smaller towns. Not all of America lives in New York, LA or Chicago.

The real tip is not to let newspapers stack up. They’re handy and useful (lining the floor to clean the oven, cleaning the windows, etc.) so getting rid of them altogether is a bad idea no matter where you live really.

I believe that eventually a more sustainable model will emerge; what that will be, I’m not sure. In the meantime, my hat is off to those altruistic publishers who manage to maintain high standards in the face of negative cash flow, but we cannot expect that to last forever. If your local newspaper is important to you, find a way to support it.

Regarding online vs. print content, there are a large number of papers out there that do *not* put their entire content online — mine, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, being one of them — and even more whose websites are so clunky and cluttered and hard to navigate that the effort is just not worth it (again, the Plain Dealer via cleveland.com).

Back to the question of clutter, though: Newspapers only become clutter when they are hoarded. If you don’t want to stop the paper subscription, you must commit to tossing the paper into the recycling bin after you’ve read it, or at the end of the day if you haven’t. I do this on my five-minute end-of-the-day cleanup. And yes, you still have to get rid of it even if you haven’t had a chance to read it. You will not read it tomorrow, or the day after, or next week. Just toss it. When you find that you’re tossing more than you’re reading, then it’s time to consider cancelling the subscription.

My husband is an editor at a newspaper that is part of a larger, growing chain. They do have a website, and they’re going to great lengths to drive readers to their online content. But the reality of the situation is that a large chunk of the subscribers are aging and either a) prefer to read something that allows them to cut out and save articles or b) do not own a computer. Advertisers in the area are well aware of this fact and, as such, choose not to advertise on the website. The company relies on print ad revenue to stay afloat.

In many communities, the problem is the generation gap. Newspaper subscribers are literally a dying breed, and younger readers who have largely grown up reading news online feel they’re entitled to news at no charge. It will take a while to convert independent, small-town businesses– the ones who tend to focus on newspaper advertising — to covert to the web when many don’t even maintain websites. If everyone cancels their newspaper subscription and advertisers no longer see value in that advertising medium but also feel not yet able or willing to plow full steam ahead with online advertising, how are these newspapers expected to remain fiscally viable? Subscriptions alone would barely pay the utility bills.

Until online advertising is just as common and “comfortable” as print for the lion’s share of current newspaper advertisers, you’re doing all news readers a disservice by advocating the cancellation of newspaper subscriptions. Newspaper owners and employees can believe in the importance of a free and energetic press until the cows come home, but not one of them can afford to hold it in such high regard if producing the news doesn’t merit reasonable compensation.

Buffet’s analysis of the news industry is interesting and makes for a good read if you have the time. Look at the bottom of page 11 and all of page 12 of the most recent year’s Berkshire Hathaway report: http://www.berkshirehathaway.c.....006ltr.pdf.

Remember: A news organization’s first priority is to produce quality content, and their second priority is to optimize it across multiple distribution platforms to reach the largest possible audience.

My dad’s a newspaper publisher, and I grew up around the business. I can tell you for sure that the first priority of a newspaper is to make enough money to stay in business, hopefully with profit enough to expand and keep things interesting. The problem that most papers have with their online offerings is how to keep the revenue streams up.

Papers make most of their money not through subscriptions, but through advertising. In the print medium, they give you all of the ads, and you can choose what to look at. Online, you choose only which articles to peruse, and never come near some of the ads. Legal advertising (lawsuits and such) are still required to be published in print, and for many smaller papers, those ads have become a major way to keep the presses running. But the industry, particularly the publications which aren’t major daily papers, has struggled and continues to struggle with a business model that allows them to make money with their online offerings. What I hear is that most of them lose money on their web publications. If everyone switches to web-only reading, there will be a lot less quality/traditional journalism to read.

(Please note that I am not suggesting that alternative news sources, like blogs, aren’t sometimes very high quality. I just mean that there are no quality controls on them, and no one to whom to complain when something is just plain wrong. A good newspaper is very concerned about its reputation for reliability. An independent blogger, maybe not so much.)