Fleeing the Newspapers

Jack Kelly writes today in the Toledo Blade about some of the difficulties now facing liberal newspapers like the L.A. Times. Here are a couple of examples of newspapers facing big problems with loss of circulation due to their editorial policies:

WHEN the web logger Laer (Cheat Seeking Missiles) called to cancel his 25-year subscription to the Los Angeles Times last Monday, he was made an extraordinary offer. The circulation service rep, detecting that he was fed up with the paper's liberal bias, offered to sell him the newspaper without the news sections. Laer was thunderstruck.

"How often must the beleaguered circulation department be dealing with calls like mine, for them to come up with a special like this?" he wrote. (On Wednesday, an L.A. Times exec wrote back, denying that the Times offers to sell partial copies of the paper, but thanking Laer "for bringing this to our attention.")

Hundreds of readers canceled their subscriptions to the Philadelphia Inquirer during the election campaign, and the circulation department there is making its editors call to try to lure them back.

Since the primary reason given for the cancellations was the Inquirer's 21 straight days of editorials praising John Kerry and attacking President Bush, it's doubtful those who wrote the editorials will be effective wooers.

I can relate to those folks frustrated with the L.A. Times. I was a long-time subscriber to that paper, perferring it to my own Orange County Register. Then along came the 2000 presidential election. All three of the Times in-house political columnists were so hard left that it was not unusual to see three different Bush-bashing columns in the paper on a single day. I finally wrote a letter to the publisher and canceled my subscription.

A week or two later I received a letter back which basically argued that the Times was not really liberal and that I should give them another chance. No thanks.

Anyone who remembers the Recall election in 2003 will remember the last minute hit piece that the Times tried to pull on Arnold. That effort backfired and may have contributed to Arnold's overwhelming win. The people just weren't going to let the Times get away with cheap political stunts.

I still take the Register and read it each day, though with the speed of the Internet, there's not much I find in the paper that I don't already know about from Internet news sources. It is valuable for local stories that don't find their way onto the net.

Newspaper publishers have got to be very worried about the growth of Internet news, not to mention the 24 hour news cycle on TV. With the exception of grocery coupons and the funnies, there's not much in the paper that you can't find more quickly and easily on the Net.