An Editorial Notebook piece in yesterday's New York Times highlights the need for local news in Connecticut and New Jersey, including the value of preserving The Bristol Press.
"New Britain and Bristol have populations of more than 60,000. It’s hard to see what would fill the void when its newspapers die," the piece says.
I would have preferred "if" instead of "when."
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Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com
4 comments:
Have to concur completely with that,Steve.
In recent years The New York Times has lost all credibility. I used to be proud to read it, but now I have little use for it besides possibly cat-box liner or box-packing material.
This 60,000 population argument holds no water. It is comical, at best. There are hundreds of communities with similiar or greater populations that do not have daily newspapers.
The Bristol Times isn't worth the effort to save as a daily. A daily with a circulation of about 11,000 was pretty marginal before newspapers started to die left and right.
You could buy the paper for next to nothing. In fact, the parent company, with 22 dailies, 300 weeklies, and the 1.5 million circulation Connecticut magazine, has stock so cheap that $78,000 would buy every share of stock in existance. The biggest stockholder only has $450 in stock.
Someone could buy the newspaper and switch to weekly publication. Produce two publications, one with news and ads, and one that only has the ads. Paid subscribers get the version with the news, others get the version without.
Daily newspapers may be dying, but weeklies are actually doing fairly well these days.
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