When the national edition came in, they started charging a dollar more and had no local NY ads– thus reducing the mythic power of places like Lincoln Center, Film Forum, and the (late lamented) Bottom Line. Stupidstupid.

The other edition of my paper I like is the Thursday edition, because it has an insert of things to do around town.

If I could get a subscription package that included those two editions, I would take it, but my choices are to get it daily, or get Saturday & Sunday, and I can’t be bothered.

On a related note, I remember talking to a publisher of a small weekly back in the 80s, who said that weeklies were growing in an otherwise flat market because they focused on local news. Can anyone corroborate that? Are weeklies still doing relatively well by hitting the local new niche?

Bear in mind this is almost newsletterly local — the paper you buy because it prints photos of your kid in the school play, etc.

Spinning the Golden Globes
By Don Feder
Leftist Hollywood rewards awful, box office flops that reflect its skewed worldview.

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20993

That is, until all local coupons go online with everything else.

It’s bad news for scissor manufacturers — when there’s no more paper, what’s left to clip?

So true.

I have friends who reluctantly buy the Star -Ledger Sunday edition, solely to get the Circuit City, Best Buy, etc. circulars and other sales flyers.

They consider it’s content biased and twisted. Most of the paper is simply thrown out - unread.

I go on to say that there’s some merit to this line of thought:

You know, now that the subject has been raised, the only time I buy a Sunday paper anymore is to get coupons. And the most exciting part of the daily paper is the big Fry’s ad chockablock with affordable electronics and gizmos.

I subscribe to the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer just for the Sunday grocery coupons. The paper costs me a little over $22 per quarter, and I save at least $20 per shopping trip (at least 3 trips per quarter), so it saves me significant cash to subscribe.

Now, if only I had time to read the thing… most of the time the Saturday half of the Sunday edition gets glanced at while I’m culling it for coupons and comics, but the Sunday half almost always goes straight into the recycling bin.

As a consequence I now get about four “pennysavers” a week bundled with all the supermarket, drug and electronic store inserts that used to only come in the paper. No news, just ads. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

We have a national culture these days. No one stays at the same job for 35 years anymore. People travel AND move all the time now. Ergo, fewer and fewer people care about extremely local events.

The local businesses can advertise all they want but economically can’t compete with the big box retailers. Increasingly, advertising is not worth the money spent for the smaller guys. Also it is more work to sell ads to a bunch of small businesses with wobbly prospects.

Self-appointed newspaper reformers can pound the table all they want about “local, local, local” but that won’t make it the elixir they dream about.

“Local” isn’t so much a grand idea as it is a desperate grasp. Just watch the local newscasts in New England these days. They hyperventilate about and exagerrate every inch of forecasted snow like it is the apocalypse and like nobody up here ever saw a snowflake.

They hyperventilate about the weather because THEY HAVE NOTHING ELSE TO SAY, not because it is good business strategy.

I still haven’t heard one media person admit they have a propaganda issue.

Just recently something like four out of five papers in Vermont have defended that judge that gave an admitted child rapist 60 days in jail.

Keep ignoring the newspaper bias issue….it is serving them so well these days.

Before I even started to dole out publishing advice, Tom Evslin had already founded a lucrative tech company, guided AT&T’s first Internet service, designed email products for Microsoft, and earned five U.S. patents.  As if that wasn&rsq…