Newspaper

Many metropolitan daily newspapers have lost circulation and some have shut down. One example of this is The Capital Times which has run for approximately 90 years. The article that reports on this was in the New York times that says the daily shutdown because of decreasing print revenue and increasing online revenue.

For community newspapers, people remain interested in recieving the daily local news. To me, the reason that these continue to do well is because in a typical city, in order to get local news, the local weeklies is practically the only place to go. For example, the Penn-Trafford Star in Pitsburgh, which has recently been launched and is finding success. The success of these weeklies comes from the local crowd that looks to these papers as one of if not the only means of truly local news.

One of our local papers, The Daily Herald, I find that there is a lot of soft news throughout the paper in comparison to hard news. The topics often covered are political news focused mainly on the Presidential and Vice-Presidential canidates. The soft news often has to do with feel good veteran stories (Veteran reunions) and feel-good sport legend stories (Lavell Edwards turns 78) I think that the newspapers still do a decent job of being "watch-dogs" but certainly not to the degree they used to. It is not uncommon to find a newspaper absolutely packed with feel-good stories and few hard news stories that would be considered the "watch-dog" stories of old.