San Jose Mercury News Weather Section 2011-12-18
Picked up the Sunday paper (San Jose Mercury News) this morning for the first time in eons — wanting to check out the coupon inserts for my latest gig at Coupons.com — and it’s amusing to see how the content is both obsolete by the time it hits the newsstand and inferiorly static compared to the Internet.
A few obvious examples:
- Front page and other actual news content: Just about all of this is online and supplemented by more current and extensive information from blogs, RSS feeds, Tweets, etc.
- Weather section: Print has a visually-appealing half-page summary of local/national/international weather (above), but Web sites and the Weather and The Weather Channels apps on my iPhone and iPad provide up-to-the-minute snapshots and forecasts from across the planet.
- Ads: Print ad units, with larger formats (half page, full page) and more variety to unit sizes, catch one’s eye better than online ads — at least for me — but can’t be clicked on.
- Real estate section: Hello Zillow, Trulia, et al.
- Free-standing inserts: There surely are a lot ‘em, but unless I’m a deal hunter or in the market for a particular item or planning a trip to a specific retail store, these go straight into the recycling bin. Also, I bought today’s paper to look for clip-able grocery coupons — and I can’t find them!
- Sunday Comics: I read comic strips a lot less since I stopped getting a print newspaper. I get my Daily Dilbert in my email inbox but otherwise don’t flip through my favorite comic strips as I once did. Score one for print.
- Tactile feel: I’ll always hate the feeling of newsprint on my hands.
No real news here in any of these observations but fun for me to note. Looking forward to seeing the inevitable day when print newspapers are entirely a format of the past.
