Okay, this is more of an opinion piece than a news story, but whatever. Recently, the Rocky Mountain News encountered some opposition to the paper’s decision to reduce its stock and TV pages, and shift attention for these items to the website. Somewhat unsurprisingly, many of the complaints were of the old-fashioned “telephone” variety (ask your parents) as opposed to email:
The Rocky received approximately 150 complaint calls during the week of February 7, when the stock-listing announcement was made, and around 35 more the following Monday morning, as opposed to just fifteen or so e-mails. This contrast suggests that computer-literate people weren’t nearly as cheesed off as were older members of the Rocky’s demographic pool, who refuse to become entangled in the World Wide Web.
Now I like to think of myself as a new-age, with-it Internet-generation kind of guy, mostly because it gives me a chance to use three improperly-hyphenated phrases in a row. Er, make that four. At any rate, I realize not everybody wants or needs a computer, but come on; it’s 2006, and if you’ve got enough money to invest in the stock market, surely you aren’t relying on the newspaper for your stock information. Is it really that important to have day-old pricing information taking up three, four, five or more pages of increasingly expensive newsprint?
The TV situation is a little different, as not everybody’s cable system has a decent program guide built in. But they’re more and more common, and I suspect that once the stock tables start to disappear form major newspapers, TV isn’t far behind. Hey, it’s either that or start cutting into the newshole, and everybody loses when that happens.
Besides, and I say this with the greatest respect for the Greatest Generation, the people most likely to complain are the people newspapers are paying attention to the least. (Of course, as all those boomers age they’re also becoming one of the largest markets out there, but I digress.)
(source: CyberJournalist.net)
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