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Notat Home

wrote:
Back in the late 90's it appeared that the daily newspaper was a dying
thing. People could go online and read the news on multiple sites.
This was true, and I found myself going in that direction. There were
web sites that had the same text and photos as the paper. Some even had
the cartoons. For awhile, I continued to get the newspaper as well as
reading it online. Somewhere around 2003, I decided that it did not
make sense to pay for the newspaper, which I was not reading very often
anymore. I cancelled it. For a few years I would read the news online,
and felt that was all I needed. However, in the last few years I've
been noticing more and more that the news media websites have become so
cluttered with useless garbage and ads that I was spending hours trying
to get the latest news, and often left their sites feeling aggravated.

These sites are no longer like a newspaper. They are a massive clutter
of trash, with bits and pieces of the news scattered in between. How
many damn videos are needed to address a news story anyhow? And why all
the flash content that takes quite awhile to load, occasionally causes
my browser to crash, and becomes very annoying more often than now, when
things are bouncing around on the page and popups and other useless
jink, not to mention that the pages are at least half advertising, and
clicking on something that appears to be news, is really ads. Then too,
how many goddamn facebook and twitter icons do they really need on each
page.

I've had it with the internet media sites. I just returned to getting
my daily newspaper, and am very pleased. I can sit back and relax while
reading the news, weather and sports, and even enjoy a few cartoons,
without being bombarded with trash and other annoyances. Sure the paper
costs a few bucks each week, but I have to take into consideration that
electricity to run the computer costs money too, not to mention having
to constantly upgrade the computer and install new browsers and software
just to keep up with all this useless garbage they flood their sites
with. After all, time is money too, and even if the upgrades dont cost
anything, it takes time to keep installing the software and learning to
use it. Yet, in the end, who needs it. A newspaper is pretty simple.
It's a text news story, and some photos to back up the text. Then
there's some advetising, and that's it. Whatever happened to the simple
websites that looked like a newspaper?

Then again, it dont stop there. The entire internet has become a
massive pile of garbage. Websites that used to offer content, now are
filled with trash. The newsgroups are dying fast, which means soon, we
will only have that repulsive facebook and twitter to say what we want
to say, and only a huge mass of garbage for websites.

Considering what I've spent for computers, software, electricity to run
them, and many many hours of my time, the cost of a newspaper is cheap
in comparison. And better yet, I can sit back and read the newspaper
without it poping up and telling me my browser is outdated and I need to
install another version of adobe flash, or finding bad page rendering,
where the text is on top of a photo, etc.....

Maybe the old ways were better.......

Where I live, the print media is terminal. The one local paper left is
full of ads and has few news articles, and those are poorly written. A
number of nationally known papers have moved to the internet and stopped
their paper editions.

And you are correct in noting that the online newspapers are containing
more and more ads that pop up over whatever you are reading, with an ad
that is often targeted directly at you. Many papers now want money to
access their online editions. One I read recently put a limit on how
many articles you can read (10 per month)without subscribing. They
usually do this with a cookie, so you can get around it by removing the
cookie, but I'm sure they will be working on something that is more
effective.

I read six or seven papers a day online, not that I buy what they are
writing, but it is interesting to see how their biases affect their
reporting of the same story. I couldn't afford to subscribe to all
those papers in the print edition, and they couldn't deliver them to me
as quickly as they can online, so there remain some advantages to using
the internet to keep up on the news.

The internet is changing, and is not the free ride we have been used to.
My feeling is that their selling ads is a way for them to stay in
business, and my having to work around those ads is a small price for me
to pay to get my news. One thing that irks me is that the ads change so
frequently; if I find a page with an article that I like and an ad that
interests me, if I read the article to the end (often on second and
third pages), then go back to the original page to read the ad, it will
no longer be there, having been replaced by another.

I thought usenet would die when all the ISPs stopped offering it, but it
has managed to survive as I think the internet does not often offer a
similar service. But I think also that the only people using usenet are
old-timers who are hanging on. Younger people do not even know it is
there. None of my kids, all adults now, knows about usenet.