Our Man Matt Welch on Free Newspapers…

…and more in a Christian Science Monitor story about the DC Examiner, the new high-profile giveaway paper:

"You'll have people say, 'what's going to happen to our democracy with the whole democratization of media?'" says Welch. "Hmmm. Let's see if we can spot the contradiction."

Whole thing here.

Comments

[Stevo Darkly]

Interesting article and good coments by Matt.

Tangential comment, spurred by the passages about the big print papers' Web sites and their efforts to get more revenue from them:

It's almost as if the newspapers are trying to discourage visitors to their sites. Of all the sites I visit, it now seems the online versions of established print newspapers are the sites most infested with pop-up ads, pop-unders, and other pissoffware. Sites that require registration are annoying too.

[R C Dean]

Matt must be doing something right. About half the time, he really pisses me off. About half the time, he bangs one right out of the park.

Just about the balance I like in a writer.

[John M. Joy]

I dunno... I guess that the dailies are getting into the free paper biz, is the news here.

Here in town, we're on the periphery of the coverage areas of the three area dailies; consequently, are given very inconsistent coverage by each. OTOH, the local weekly, which arrives free-of-charge in our mailbox every Wednesday (with a separate mini-edition on Saturday, also free), provides coverage so comprehensive as to be deemed authoritative by most (hell, the thing's about an inch thick!) - something not approached by all three dailies taken together.

(For more urgent news, and national/international, I usually rely on electronic, especially new, media - the local dailies usually are only reprinting wire service stories anyway.)

JMJ

[Thomas Paine's Goiter]

Sites that require registration are annoying too.

http://www.bugmenot.com/

[Franklin Harris]

I gave a copy of this article to all of my bosses, who currently have me working on a plan to require our readers to pay for access to our newspaper's web site. (I know of only about half a dozen papers, apart from the Wall Street Journal, that are trying this, and I know of one paper that used to charge but gave up on it and also closed its company that offered to supply other newspapers with the software to handle paid subscribers.)

[M.C. Johnson]

From the CSM article: "A publication without a point of view isn't worth reading," avers John Battelle, a cofounder of Wired magazine and columnist at BoingBoing. "At the end of the day, this fabled mythology of objectivism has hampered newspapering."

Was he talking about Ayn Rand or did he mean 'objectivity?' Or am I being needlessly snarky?