You know the problem with the newspapers now is that they have become more driven by profits instead of focusing on the content. I think these newspapers have to have become consumed with stockholder value and forgotten that a newspapers first job is to report the news…

Interestingly, short words and short paragraphs are also much easier to view on screen than large blocks of text. So, maybe we should all write online as tabloid journalists!

Basically, you have papers using the same or similar ad rates (perhaps increasing them over time) for the same sized advertising.

However, I do not think that the price they are charging for a full page ad adequately reflects the price of using up an entire 1/4 of a sheet of paper.

Most of the traditional papers that you buy now are 50% or more filled with ads. Useless classifieds, shiny smooth circulars that fill trash cans near newsstands to overfilling, public notices in unreadable type, huge full page paeons to the corporate gods of our modern oligarchic plutocrat culture.

I say, just say no. Charge the same amount for a half page ad as you would for a full page ad. Don’t do full page ads at all, and put some more news in the newspaper.

Or keep the amount of news the same and reduce the number of pages. More and more that is what seems to be happening with the “commuter” papers that are now in most large US cities.

People are rejecting the 50 and 75 cent (or more) newspapers because they don’t deliver what they want in the quantities that they expect. People want a brief article that covers the salient points of current events, and they turn to other sources for issues that concern them as individuals.

Heck, in Boston, you can get a Herald for free any day of the week in the afternoon, they give it away because no one will buy it for a quarter in the morning (why pay for what you can get for free in 8 hours?). The Globe is frequently free as well. Meanwhile, the Metro, which is free in the morning in all the subway stations and has perhaps 20 pages, is outcirculating them both. It’s not a great paper by any stretch, but there are national, international, and local articles in it, and it covers sports and entertainment. Anything more doesn’t fit into people’s daily schedules at the moment, and those topics that are of substantial interest people newsgoogle in the morning or through the day (or use an RSS feed from googlenews to monitor) instead.

Host banning advertisers is possibly unethical, but it certainly saves my retinas. And if you’ve got popup problems, you may want to look into a spyware removal tool.

Sooner or later, all these newspapers are going to go out of business. You’ll have monthly or weekly news magazines, half a dozen actual papers with pricetags to match, and a large number of free or very low priced commuter papers that spit out the latest wire service articles on a daily basis.

We might actually miss the newspapers, if any of them were still independently reporting national and international stories, but sadly they aren’t, and no one will give a crap when they are gone.

I think that says it all.