SLO County News BlogGolf, Wine, Real Estate, Business & Travel NewsFREE SLO NewsSunday, November 28, 2004As we mentioned in an earlier post, we get all our San Luis Obispo County news online (for free). We don't subscribe to any local newspapers or magazines. It's not that we're cheap, we just prefer the convienence of finding and reading local news online. Plus, newspapers and magazines seem to just accumulate in the office, home or landfill. We do pick up free newspapers and magazines on occasion like HopeDance and New Times, then after reading them, use them to get a fire going in our fireplace.We usually don't even visit our local news websites directly, but obtain our news by searching for it. A simple search for "obispo" or "slo" at Google News, Yahoo! News, Feedster, Rocket News, Topix.net, etc. will provide you with up-to-date local news from practically all of our local news publications. The news we share on our own news page is from an RSS feed at Topix.net that we access from our webserver and transform into HTML using XSLT before returning it to your client browser. Apparently, many share our preference for obtaining news online - and this certainly presents a problem for our newspaper and magazine publishers. According to a Wired article posted this week, young people just aren't interested in reading newspapers and print magazines. In fact, the Washington Post learned that focus-group participants declared they wouldn't accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason - they didn't like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses. Adam L. Peneberge at Wired shares, "Don't think for a minute that young people don't read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint.... And when young people go online, they tend to browse for news in much the same way they window-shop for jeans or sneakers: sampling a headline here, a blog entry there, a snippet of a story there, until their news cravings are satisfied." A twenty-something blogger interviewed by Wired believes that "as news-reader programs improve and become more widely used, adding the sort of auto-filtering and smart-sorting capabilities of a decent e-mail client, their popularity will snowball." He also predicts that print media, which he says his generation has largely rejected in favor of digital dissemination of news, will die off within 30 years, "when the dead-tree readers will die off." What this world will look like is anyone's guess, but it probably won't include The Tribune delivery guy racing down your street at 6 in the morning (another reason we choose not to subscribe). Newspapers Should Really Worry - Wired News Read More
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