The fall of the newspaper and why no one needs a subscription

Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Thu, Oct 29 2009 | 3 Comments

The Wall Street Times is one of the largest newspapers in the country. It has subscribers from all walks of life from coast to coast. However, are those readers actually getting out of the newspaper what they were looking for in the beginning?

I honestly don’t think so.

In today’s times there isn’t a real reason to have a subscription to a newspaper at all. You can get your news from the internet or 24 hour cable news. The news on regular non-cable television is even on for hours a day now. People are becoming increasingly aware of the move to a more digital form of the news.

There is a downside of the news becoming completely digital; print journalists are losing their jobs. Newspapers all across the country are going out of business and while newspapers like the Wall Street Journal don’t seem to be doing too badly right now, they have had to begin charging for information on its website to make up for the amount of readers its losing in subscriptions.

The good thing for the newspapers is that they aren’t having to pay as much for printing services and publishing services simply because they don’t need the same amount of supplies.

Overall, I feel as though newspapers in their current print form will likely become more and more scarce. I think that many local newspapers will hurt the worst and many will go out of business altogether.

As funny as it may seem, in the past few weeks (contrary to exactly how I feel) another print newspaper has been showing up in my town of 20,000. I completely did not expect for there to be another print newspaper here ever. With three local newspapers/publications in the county, the market is over covered.

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Tags: journalists, wall street, wall street times

Sirius XM radio will be raising rates soon.

Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Wed, Jan 21 2009 | 0 Comments

If you are a subscriber to Sirius XM radio you can expect to see a higher monthly fee starting March 11. Of course, to hook current subscribers in even more, customer service reps are “suggesting” that subscribers “lock in” their rate for 3 years with a contract.

How much more can you expect to pay?

From SiriusBuzz.com:

As suspected the will be a $2 increase for additional subscriptions and a $2.99 fee for the online internet radio service. The silver lining in all of this is that all internet subscriptions will now feature the 128k “premium” feed.

I always wanted to have satellite radio in my car, but now I have iPod connectivity, I don’t even listen to the radio anymore. Even if I did have satellite radio, with a rate increase I would probably just switch over to listening to my iPod.

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Tags: subs, sirius, internet

UPDATE: No deal yet reached in Time Warner/Viacom spat

Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Wed, Dec 31 2008 | 0 Comments

Today Time Warner received thousands of calls from their subscribers asking them not to blackout Viacom’s stations.

As of tonight, no deal has been reached between the two companies.

So, at 12:01 tonight (or in the morning?) 15 million Time Warner customers will no longer receive these channels.

Time Warner Chief Executive Glenn Britt on Wednesday called Viacom’s demand for a 12 percent increase in fees — an extra $39 million on top of the estimated $300 million it pays Viacom annually — extortion and outrageous given the recession. Viacom countered that the requested increase amounted to an extra $2.76 annually per subscriber.-AP

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Tags: subscribers, subs, outrage