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Loading ...The long goodbye to newspapers
khenry
The Guardian is well known and lampooned for its left-wing hectoring BS. However, the decision to attempt outright emotional blackmail regarding people’s water usage in the same week that Thames Water sent out their unmetered “Part 2” bills of not less than £100 was the last straw for me. Naturally the paper did it to get a reaction. Ultimately my reaction was to stop putting up with the constant left-wing bollocks written by the paper’s named writers and just stop reading it.
As such, it was good timing when the paper gave out discount vouchers halving the price of its newspaper at the start of this month. Since a price cut is what you expect from The Sun, putting the Guardian’s effective price back down to 40p per day and 80p at weekends lets the broadsheet paper compete with both the tabloids and the former broadsheets. For circulation purposes, the vouchers will stop the rot setting in due to belt-tightening, especially since they’re valid until New Year’s Eve. However, the water campaign and the price offer marks the beginning of the end of buying the actual newspaper, bringing to an end 12 uninterrupted years of reading it at the weekend.
The cold reality is that a newspaper’s only worth buying for jobseekers if its job section generates interviews, which kept me buying both the Guardian and The Evening Standard for the previous and current jobs. Since the score is 2-1 to The Standard, The Guardian’s going to go when the voucher campaign ends.
Habit is a powerful thing. Many people would have said “read it on the internet” but not factored in the electric bill in reading the entirety of a newspaper in a single day, represented online rather than on paper. The Guardian has a smart approach to online archiving of its paper and The Observer; you can read it all online on that specific day, but as of midnight the next day, that content will disappear and you’ll be taken on an online Indiana Jones-style quest to find specific articles, and sent to obscure message board sections to seek out reader answers in regular Q&A columns, for example, regarding money. Even if it’s hard to find stories occasionally, offering all content including the job ads online now means that the savings on the paper’s full price can’t be ignored.
It’s different for TV scheduling; people do want a printed TV guide for convenience – another reason to buy a weekend paper. However, with the free papers giving a daily instant look and different sections of the web giving the scheduling, there are enough ways to find out what’s on and if you subscribe to Sky your EPG makes a printed guide unnecessary - it’s really that good. It’s little wonder that Freeview ripped it off for PVRs and DVD Recorders. Radio Times is in rude health simply because people want it for its original purpose - without it I would have missed Radiohead live on Radio 2 for example. Once again, you’re raising your bill by using the iPlayer all the time to watch or hear the same stuff, so the catchup services serve as a reminder of the original transmission times. Once you’ve seen/heard a show, it’s over with and you don’t need to try to find time to catch up.
So, with my two main reasons for having this newspaper gone, it’s a no-brainer saving to make in current economic times to go from half-price now to free at the end of the year (after 12 years of “addiction”, I’ll have to wean myself off it!). I’ll look forward to enjoying the paper(s) online except for when there are unmissable special offers like the discount vouchers, or free books or CDs. Otherwise my long goodbye to the Guardian, and paid newspapers in general, has begun.
I gave up newspapers along time ago, I get all my news online, And yes I have worked out the electric bill and its miniscule , my laptop uses very little electricity and the other point is newspapers are filled with fluff so I don’t waste my life reading nonsense.
Newspapers are simply used for country wide political control.
Vouchers and offers are always for worthless crap anyway.
So you’re implying that the web is a fountain of truth compared to newspapers? Even if I’m giving them up, as an ex-journalist I’m not that unrealistic, you swap 1-10 biased viewpoints in print for 10,000 of them on the web. A newspaper’s website *might* help strike a balance.
What I left out of my post was the fact that the Guardian’s job service site isn’t secure, so I only used it for external links rather than risk my details getting hacked through it. I bet that anyone who applied for a job through Monster.com wishes they used a newspaper now, following that breach. I’ve got the job, can get TV schedules online, those are my reasons. Politics wise if that’s what you think, see you at the ballot box to put your money where your mouth is in 2010.