Even Oden looks surprised. It has been awhile since I purchased the Oregonian. I seem to remember it was 35c once and $1 on the weekends. Ack, I’m aging. I do read the O online as it is a source of Portland and Oregon news, albeit a little sensationalized. I can’t believe with the cutting of staff that the O is going to be worth 75c a day. All those Macy’s ads must not be paying the bills. Is the writing that good?
Another thought – maybe they raised the prices because after last weekend’s bigoted DVD inclusion, they lost some longtime readers.
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Pretty amazing. Can you imagine Portland without a major daily newspaper? It’s not a complete fantasy. I mean in a failing economy where news is at your fingertips online, are you really going to shell out 75cents a day for a paper that’s more wire reports than local reporting?
Geoff, you make a good point. A city without a daily newspaper. I hadn’t thought of that with my vitriol. It would be a strange world without the newspaper sitting there at the dentist office or when you’re getting new tires. While I don’t buy the paper, there is something about seeing the yellow dispensers every morning that is routine.
To be fair, 75 cents still buys you a lot of reading material, compared with the cost of a magazine or book. I don’t think most of us realize what a bargain all that LOCAL information in our daily paper STILL is. The bigger newspapers of the past at lower prices were a friggin’ steal.
Yes, I realize you can read stuff online. But you can’t find the same ads that tell you about local events, stores, nurseries, sporting stuff, concerts and other arts events, etc., online.
You just can’t.
However, I am flirting with the idea of canceling my 0 subscription because the proliferation of wire stuff that I can read on the web is getting annoying. But I only pay $2 for a full week’s subscription. That’s a hell of a bargain, compared with 75 cents a pop for daily papers and $1.50 on Sundays.
I read the front page of the “How We Live” section, the comics, and the Sunday crossword puzzle, and that’s pretty much it. If it were up to me, I’d cancel our subscription, but my wife likes to read the whole paper.
I have at least a week’s worth of unread papers stacked up by my front door. They’re still in the plastic sacks to keep them dry in this oh-so-rainy weather we’re experiencing lately (/sarcasm).
I had already decided yesterday to cancel the subscription, even though I have a soft spot for newspapers in general and a desire to help keep friends at The O employed in specific. And since I was on the bargain basement price of 10 bucks per month? I could justify the only occasional read.
But no more. Need to finish this and pick up the phone…
Just canceled the paper. Made a point of telling the guy that it was *also* due to the DVD in Sunday’s paper; it sounded as if he’d heard that response a few times before in the last few days…!
Do O cutbacks mean that piece ‘O shit Food Day will stop appearing on my front porch every week?
I canceled my subscription as well. I loved having a physical paper there in the morning, even if I had very mixed feeling about the Oregonian’s editorial policies, but the DVD was just far too much. I won’t pay to have hate literature delivered to me.
You can stop the Food Day delivery by calling the subscription line and telling them you don’t want it. I stopped it years ago and have only had to call once since then when a new delivery person forgot to not deliver it.
I’m not there yet. This country was founded on a free press, which includes newspapers. The fewer voices we have, the less free we are. I didn’t like the DVD and expressed that opinion to the O.
I still think we gotta support them and for $100 a year, I think it’s a bargain — considering what I pay a year for passion-fruit tea from Starbucks.
It’s not all that different than supporting our troops (while not supporting the war).
Life is shades of gray — it’s not black and white. Those who think it is have sunglasses that I can’t — or don’t want to — afford.
Well Talea, I don’t really care if the O goes away. First off, the O is the worst example of media monopoly there is – Newhouse publications – a giant corporate conglomerate with layers and layers of management hooey and a tangle of bureaucracy located where? New Jersey? They have little understanding of Portland and the region and it really shows in their overall paper.
In addition, there is actually a ton of free press out there already. It’s on the internet – from the NY Times, to Willamette Week, to French papers and British papers and the New Yorker and small community papers like my favorite – the St. Johns Sentinel.
There are also countless, and many excellent examples of free press, through what has to be one of the most revolutionary evolutions in citizen journalism since the print press: Blogs. Many of these are run by incredibly talented professional journalists. In many cases the quality of reporting on these blogs is on par, if not better, than stuff coming out of the Oregonian. We also have countless radio programs (OPB for example), podcasts, web, video, etc. etc.
If anything have MORE voices in press today, not less.
I really don’t understand why I need to support a newspaper I feel is out of touch, often provides news as if it was written for 10 year olds and provides more sports coverage than international news coverage. Good reporters at the O, certainly. But the editorial board can kiss my ass. The crap the O often tries to pass off as news is just embarrassing. Remember the idiotic op-ed about New Orleans last year where the man was whining about the lack of jogging paths? Or the one from the guy who was bitching because Meter Maids no longer wear skirts? Or how about the recent vegan potluck article that was really a private paid for catered dinner party for Portland’s liberal privileged class? Or the lovely tabloid cover of Cats Surfing! Cat stuck in a Tree! (I think that’s when I finally said, enough).
Listening to whining about the O going away is (to quote the journalist Cathy Seipp), like listening to the “last wistful moans of a dying brontosaurus.”
Just because the O goes away doesn’t mean something better won’t pop up in its place either in print or online. Perhaps something that actually understands how to design a usable website, provide news that is smart and relevant and engages and challenges readers rather than the current and out of date top-down “it’s news when we tell you it is news” model from the O. Wouldn’t that be cool?
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