Newspaper stories are too long

If you give readers a compelling reason 5-7 days a week to buy or subscribe to a paper, they will buy it.

Leave all the breaking news, updates, short blogs (NOT columns) etc. to the Internet. Then fill your print edition with insightful columns, enterprise, takeouts, photos, analysis that is never posted online, and it might work. Sure, print edition would be about half the length as now, but that means zilch. Quality of exclusive content does. For compromise and oldtimers, you could still have all the agate, boxes, etc. neatly packaged onto one page reserved for that, and then the rest would be all the analytical stuff I described.

Obviously, the exclusive content woudl have to be 95-100% local so there's little risk of having it repeated to that extent at some online spot like espn. com or foxsports.

 

They want opinion (as long as it agrees with their own) and to learn something (as long as it doesn't go against their own set of "facts").

 

I'm around people in their early to mid 20s every day. They won't buy newspapers no matter how you package them or put in them. They don't believe they should have to pay for information. They believe that "information wants to be free." Seriously, do a little Googling. They are indignant that anyone would ever ask them to pay for a newspaper - or even online info. They think it's their birth right to get it for free. And no way are they carrying a paper around.

 

Hard to argue with that, and fruitless besides. I know I'm sounding like all those old fogies from the '70s I grew up with, complaining about all "those hippies, long hair and that dang loud music" when I say this, but for these twentysomethings to think they are entitled to everything free goes beyond just the part about buying newspapers, and is going to make their world pretty much suck as they get older and how they find out that no matter what century or era we are living in, things just don't come for free and it's going to bite them in the arss time and time again.

 

Quoted for truth. You hit the nail on the head, Waylon.

 

In the internet era, you can get a surprising amount of good stuff for free.

 

That's because some of them are stupid. No, seriously, dumb as a box of rocks. On the other hand, it has been their birthright to get news content for free online. That's the only model they know, so why should they think any different?
Someone born in 1980 turns 30 this year. Assuming they started high school at 14, their first exposure to the internet was dialup and free content. The model hasn't changed.
As the web got more sophisticated, the content stayed free. As paying for web access has dropped, content stayed free.
So roughly an entire generation knows only free content, at least in most markets. The ones who have adopted a pay model have convinced people that they are getting something of value, and of high value, because you are paying for it online. This is known as the Wall Street Journal model and now people believe that financial information is worth paying for.
Everything else, is free. Good stuff, the entire report of the NY Times. The Washington Post. The various wires. But also enhanced free content like video reporting or blogs or anything else fancy the web does well.
It would be the same for a generation of people trained to believe that they didn't have to put money in the soda machine to get something to drink for free. You just pushed a button and out came a Coke. If all the sudden you told people that they had to put fifty cents in the machine to get a Coke, but Pepsi was still free, how many people would put money in the Coke machine?
Maybe a few, but would it be enough people to support an entire industry, from manufacture to distribution? Likely not.

As for the younger generation being dumb, they really aren't. It is more a selective stupidity that is common from generation to generation.
The younger people know things and know things well that me or someone like me will never get a handle on. But on the flipside, we know things that they don't. Like when I was kid I could program the VCR to keep it from flashing 12:00 over and over again, but my dad, a former broadcaster, couldn't. But he could drive a stickshift and I couldn't until I was out of high school.

 

I absolutely agree, but wouldn't limit this mindset to people in their 20s. I'll have friends in their 40s and beyond call and say "I heard you had a picture of my son in the paper this week. Could you e-mail me some of the photos you took, and bring me a few copies of the paper on Sunday?" Of course, no offer to pay for anything.
Our local fire department doesn't subscribe to our paper. A person with a somewhat connected department has his office in the FD office and has his paper delivered there. The paper gets passed around the office, and if there's a news story about the FD without fail someone from the FD will call and ask me to drop off some extra copies of the paper. Another person in the FD will ask me why the story isn't on the Web site yet. No offer at all to purchase copies of the paper or to start a subscription, but I should give copies to them as some sort of favor. Um, no.

 

But they should volunteer their time to talk to us for nothing in return because...

 

Stories are too short and photos are too big, IMO.