For most of my life, I loved reading the newspaper.
As a kid, I started by reading the comics. Then I moved on to the political cartoons. Over time, I grew to enjoy articles about politics, the economy, business and lifestyles – pretty much everything except cars, sports and fashion.
Reading exposed me to ideas I never considered, viewpoints foreign to my experience, and thought provoking essays from writers like Mike Royko, Diana Nelson Jones and Phil Musick.
I read whatever local paper was available. The Morning Call in Tamaqua, the Pittsburgh Press & Post Gazette in Pittsburgh and the Sun Sentinel in Florida.
The Decline of Print Newspapaers
In the early 2000s, I began to see a major decline in the quality of newspapers. First, I began to catch a lot of typos and errors. Then the articles became shorter and shorter. And finally, many newspapers changed their format so that pictures with captions became the primary editorial content instead of in-depth articles. Typos, misprints and delivery problems became the norm.
By 2014, I had enough of the local papers. Most had been acquired by Tronc Media which, in my opinion, ruined them by firing key personnel and standardizing content to “ads, awful & clickbait”.
My wife and I both still wanted a paper so we tried the New York Times. To our delight, we found well written articles, interesting thought-provoking essays and a huge Sunday Paper that we would enjoy for hours and hours.
Within 2 years the Times fell apart too. They fired a lot of people, writing and editing worsened, and delivery became problematic.
Today, it seems like all print (and online) newspapers are trying to copy the worst of the internet – clickbait, misleading titles, listicles, and BuzzFeed type articles (following the lead of Tronc).
To make more money, any paper I subscribed to immediately sold my name and address to anyone and everyone, who then spams, junk mails and calls me in an attempt to sell me their crap. (NY Times Wine Club Membership anyone?)
The Failure That is Online News
I tried Google News, NPR, The Guardian, NY Times and USA Today.
- Google news – 100% clickbaity articles with bait and switch headlines
- NPR – Decent articles but limited content.
- The Guardian – Probably the best so far for me.
- USA Today – Unreadable. So many ads that rotate and resize I literally cannot scroll to read an article.
- NY Times Online – Ever increasing prices while lowering content and quality
- Any local paper online – take the worst of everything above and combine it.
Probably the biggest realization for me is that reading online news adds zero value to my life.
The days of learning something from thought provoking essays have passed. The news media tries to makes me outraged or fearful so I stay “tuned in” for ads. It’s just schlock and bad entertainment.
So I’m taking a pass on news. My consumption has dropped to a lifetime low.
Things have been fine without me being up to date on every tragedy, outrage or political statement. I don’t miss the barrage of ads, sponsored articles and generic fluff.
Instead, I read a few blogs and books. I’ve also invested more time writing articles on my two blogs.
Because I do no advertising and have no hidden commercial agenda, I can write about whatever I think might be helpful and interesting to my readers (and me).
At the very least, writing these articles has given me an opportunity to create something instead of simply consume information.
Even the articles I never publish teach me something.
If you’re an avid reader like I have been all of my life, you might want to try a bit of writing yourself. If you do, I hope you are as pleasantly surprised with the results as I’ve been.