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.

Profits rose 24% while they lost 100,000 subscribers, but the news also brought a lower stock price for the company. Its shares fell 10% today after the news came out about the loss of subscribers.

The only way I can explain such a phenomenon is that rates are on the rise. The rate hike would be exactly what satellite networks are fighting when they advertise against cable.

In reality, fees and rate hikes are causing profits to rise, which is also a likely reason for the loss in subscribers. In a recession, however, things like cable or satellite TV are sometimes seen as a want rather than a need and customers drop the service.

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.

Together, they have 78 million subscribers.

Verizon is putting up $5.9 billion to buy out Alltel and will be assuming $22.2 billion in debt from the company.

The bad news is that Alltel’s Little Rock headquarters will likely lose most of it’s 3,000 jobs. Verizon says that it will keep a call center there, but the higher paying jobs will likely be lost.

Source

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

Now in an attempt to turn things around, they are looking at everything they can do to help. First they sold around 3,000 towers to a company so they could lease them back and now they are looking for a buyer for their iDEN network.

I have Sprint. I have never had a problem with their service (or their prices). While almost everyone I know has ATT wireless, in our town there is no 3G coverage, while Sprint covers us with EVDO. In my opinion, Sprint is the better carrier to have.

It sounds great, it really does. I have had cable TV and internet for almost 5 years where I live. I do not have Comcast though…this is where it becomes a poor choice. Many people have had a lot of problems with Comcast. Readers of the blog The Consumerist have voiced their opinion about Comcast and it was voted the #2 “Worst Company in America 2008″ only losing to Countrywide Home Loans…one of the largest players in the mortgage crisis. Comcast has a history of spotty internet and phone and over-charging on monthly bills.

Another trick is that at the bottom of the press release is where it says Triple Play package availability and offers vary by market. Total number of Wii systems is limited. With Comcast’s history, many people will still be hesitant to buy into the program, even with the enticing offer.

Napster was once a great peer to peer file sharing program where music was free and plentiful. After being attacked by the RIAA and Lars (see: Metallica) it shut down. Then in 2002 Chris Gorog the CEO of Roxio, a CD burning program, paid $5 million for Napster’s assets (which included it’s logo). He was under the assumption that he could re-launch the program and sell legal music. He believed with the familiar logo and name would bring in millions of subscribers.

Now the service has 6 million songs and only 760,000 subscribers. Since the launch, Napster has never pulled a profit. Some unhappy investors are trying to put themselves on the board at the company’s annual meeting in September.

Shawn Fanning did a great thing, paving the way for mainstream digital downloads. However, after the RIAA went after the users, many people stopped using the program. Many moved on to other programs like Limewire. Some subscribe to other music services or download songs with programs like iTunes. Without a lot of publicity, a lot of the old users think downloading and using Napster could land them in court. Until I read about some of the investors of the company launching a proxy campaign, I didn’t even know that Napster was still around, let alone a subscription service.

They need a marketing campaign…badly.

Then again, at least Napster is in the news…no publicity is bad publicity…especially when people don’t even know you exist.

The FCC has successfully granted a monopoly. These are the only 2 satellite radio broadcasters in the U.S. Now, they are not a monopoly across all forms of radio, but if you want satellite radio…this is now your only option. But it’s no worse than cable television in any town. You can either have cable, which is one format, Air, or satellite.

So, what’s going to happen?

Well:

Subscribers can purchase the channels they want, not an overall subscription. Current subscribers do not have to purchase new receivers. There won’t be any rate increases for 3 years.