Question of the week: Do you still subscribe to a printed daily newspaper?

by Washington News Council’s Heidi Dietrich and John Hamer

NO! by Heidi Dietrich, age 30

This winter, for the first time since college, I stopped subscribing to a daily newspaper.

It pained me to phone in the cancellation to the Seattle Times’ circulation department. I kept the subscription going for the past couple of years because I couldn’t stand to contribute to the sad decline of the print newspaper business. It’s a problem that hits close to home. After seven years at the Puget Sound Business Journal, I was laid off last April due to sinking revenue.

It also hurt because I grew up in a newspaper family. My dad worked first for The Columbian in Vancouver, and then for The Seattle Times as I was growing up. The newspaper was a part of daily life. When my sister and I were young, my father read the comics to us at the Sunday breakfast table. Later, we read the articles on our own, vying for the Sunday travel and lifestyle sections. As an adult, I looked forward to spending a few moments with the newspaper and a cup of coffee in the morning.

But in the last few years, the daily newspaper began to change. Thanks to shrinking revenue, the paper itself grew smaller and smaller, with less in-depth features and enterprise reporting. Sections were eliminated or combined. Letters to the editor were relegated to a small part of the page.

And, most importantly, I’d already read the articles. I’d seen the news appear on my Twitter feed and gone to a number of online news sites to get the stories. By the time the paper landed on my doorstep, it was old news. More and more, keeping the subscription felt like a charity case.

I’d held out far longer than most of my peers. Most of my friends never even started subscribing to a daily newspaper, since they could already rely on the Internet after graduating from college. Others subscribed for a time but abandoned the practice as online news became more and more prevalent. Most newspaper subscribers I knew were my parents’ and grandparents’ age.

It’s been a few months since I stopped receiving a newspaper, and it’s interesting to see how my news consumption habits have changed. I read just as much news as before, but less from The Seattle Times, as I’m more apt to link to a variety of news sites. I regularly check national papers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, neighborhood news sites such as MyBallard, and niche web sites such as TechFlash or Cliff Mass’ weather blog. Beyond the serious news sites, I visit blogs on cooking, running, the outdoors, and music.

I’m just as likely to browse an article at 9 p.m. as at the breakfast table. I learned about the Lusty Lady closing and a modern downtown Seattle highrise being torn down yesterday afternoon on Twitter. I find I most often first hear about breaking news via Tweets and Facebook posts, and then link to the actual articles on a news site.

What about you? Are you still subscribing? Leave a comment here.

YES! by John Hamer, age 64

This morning, like most mornings, I walked out to the end of my driveway and picked up The Seattle Times.

I laid it out on the kitchen counter, poured myself a cup of coffee, filled a bowl with cereal, sliced a couple of strawberries on top, and began to read my morning newspaper.

Front page. Editorial page. Northwest section. Comics. Sports page. OK, I just skim some of it, but I always find something interesting and worth reading. And I usually glance at the ads, especially the full-page ones.

Am I part of a dying breed? Sometimes I feel that way.

But when I moderated a panel at Seattle Rotary a couple of weeks ago on the future of newspapers, I asked for a show of hands: How many people still read The Seattle Times on paper? Of the 500 Rotarians present, at least three-fourths of them raised their hands. OK, there was a lot of grey hair in this crowd….

Then I asked: How many also read The Seattle Times online? More than half of those in the room raised their hands. (David Boardman, Times executive editor and one of my panelists, began to applaud.)

But as the blog by Heidi Dietrich on this page makes clear, many younger people have stopped subscribing to newspapers and get most of their news online. (BTW, welcome to Heidi, who will now be blogging regularly on this page about media issues and ethics.)

Newspapers used to have a kind of monopoly on the news, but in the Internet era those days are gone. People have many more options for news and information, and the mainstream newspapers are struggling to adjust to the “new news ecosystem.”

We’re clearly in a transition period where some people (like me) still like the touch and feel of newsprint in our hands and others (like Heidi) prefer to get their news electronically, whether on a laptop, Blackberry, Kindle, iPhone or iPad or other device.

Granted, I also read at least a half-dozen other news websites online, however, including some that gather stories from dozens of news sites all over the world. Today, news junkies can mainline online until they virtually overdose on news.

Still, there’s something about having that newspaper with my coffee in the morning. The crinkly feel of newsprint. The faint scent of ink. The full-page color ads.

How about you? Comments welcome! Leave a comment here.