Beginning Monday morning, Oct. 1, 2012 folks across South Louisiana will no longer receive their morning copy of the Times-Picayune. The Times-Picayune, New Orleans’ Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper, has 640,000 weekly readers with 71 percent market penetration, yet… it is a daily paper no longer. Has the world ended, I don’t think so.
With so many real time media outlets to choose from, yesterday’s news with your morning cup of Joe is just kind of, well… “yesterday’s news.” It used to always frustrate me to wrangle that big package of unwieldy newsprint while I was trying to be informed, grab a muffin and snuggle up to my first cup of coffee. I got to where I only really read the Sunday paper, while the dailies just went into the trash bin (now the recycle bin).
I now religiously read my “Morning News Update” from the AR Democrat Gazette every morning. The new “newspaper” is much easier to manage on my Kindle with the coffee and muffin (whole wheat, low fat these days). I’m probably reading more news than ever, and yes, I see those advertisers’ ads just as ever. There are a lot of online things that I don’t quite get, but news on my Kindle, that one, I’ve embraced.
Is journalism as we knew it dead? Not by a long shot. It’s gotten leaner, quicker, and much less “inky.”
