Get Ready for a lot more Posters on 24x7

[Raven Ninja 12]

The sun will get nothing and like it. Who needs the sun when we can all just go to 24x7?

[brown2RAVEN]

However, since my wife enjoys reading the paper on weekends, we actually still subscribe to the Sun. As a die-ing breed of people who still pay for home delivery, I strongly feel that I should be able to go online FOR FREE.

You will get a "hefty discount" , only 29.99 per year.

[Raven 555]

I don't care about the forums over there and never have, but I do check the Sun website for news sometimes, especially since I moved to Florida. The idea of charging for online access seems curious, to say the least. Are all the Tribune papers going to be doing this, or is this brainstorm just the Sun's doing?

The Sun very well could be the test for the Tribune.

[Saltwater_Rider]

As far as message boards, I left due to the trolls.

As far as news, I haven't bought a paper in years.

[shine]

NY times also gives some free access monthly. When that runs out you can delete everything to the right of the ? in the URL and get access to the article. The Sun may have a similar soft wall

thanks!
I always use up my allotted freebie article quota on the NYT and sometimes I just dont clique the article because of the count.
I will not try deleting the everything to the right of the question mark.
and I dont want to pay that really high price for online content.

I belong to both forums...
some of the threads are so funny-
like the gripe about fixing the male vs female security bottleneck at the stadium...

I also pay for home delivery of the paper just to support the local paper...
but its quality has diminished over the past decade.

[paulie]

I see nothing's changed over there in the past 12 years. The same jackoffs are running the show now as they were back then. Once upon a time, some rocket scientist over there decided it would be a great idea to publicly post a user's IP address at the bottom of each of their online messages. Needless to say, half the board's members left after that brilliant idea. Most of them eventually came here. Now the same geniuses want to charge for what's free everywhere else.

Of course, knowing the Sun is in bed with Peter Angelos, it's hardly surprising.

I made a great decision 12 years ago.

Yep 12 years ago I got banned for
pointing out to SunSpot publicly
why IP publishing was a very bad
idea. Remember you well, but the
"great decision" was AdminSteve
stepping up and opening the original
Ravens Roost Forum out of his own
pocket to give us all a free and safe
place to post. Think of RR as being
kind of the grandfather to what you
have here.

[shine]

This is why they are charging. Newspaper companies are struggling to figure out how to stay afloat in a world where most John Q Consumers opt to use the internet to get their news instead of reading a newspaper.

I was thinking about this the other day, the way news delivery to the public has changed. Think about the (terrible awful) Mike Flanagan situation. 10-15 years ago, you might've heard it announced on the 11pm news, the full story comes out in the next day's newspaper. But living in the modern era, we get twitter/text updates from EVERY stage. First, it was a body was found at the Flanagan house. Then a lot of speculation about police being there, what happened, who it was, etc. Then it was announced it was Mike Flanagan found dead. Then a lot of speculation about how he died, motive, etc. Then finally announced the next morning it was a self inflicted gunshot.

My point of posting all this is that the era we live in, the "newspaper" is really just a blog for most people. Twitter gives us the quick news items, like a ticker on a building. We can't get all the details from it, but it's the quickest way to get instant information. We follow up that information by looking at blogs for the detailed analysis and reporting of the news.

The one area the newspaper really helps with is objectiveness (hold your laughter please). Blogs have the drawback of being opinionated. The "news" should be an unbiased document which provides us the facts and figures of the topic. This is why. if I were in charge at the Sun, I would discontinue the weekday edition of the paper. The weekend edition is still useful, but mainly for the ads. If you want to charge for online content...fine, but don't do it "per visit amount". Do it like ESPN...The majority of their straight up reporting is free. The insider content is the deep analysis and expanded information. Some people may end up paying for that, but you can probably make enough money off of advertising with just free online access to the basic news content. I know I go there daily just to peruse the information. If they charge, that site won't be visited, because I can just use twitter for quick hit updates, blogs for further details, and message boards for discussion.

Just one young man's opinion.

I agree...
the younger generation uses, reads and values the "news" differently.
My assistant is 22. She "follow" 50 billion peoples twitter feeds...
and she gets her news updates via text from - Hotmail?
She doesnt bother to read news articles unless I ask her to do so.
Maybe its a product of her age, But I always read the Sunday paper and or watched the news. Its seems that "new's" today is really celebrity sightings.

[Ravenswintitle]

I'm a neanderhal - I still read my local paper and the WSJ every day.

[ActualSpamBot]

I agree...
the younger generation uses, reads and values the "news" differently.

I think your engaging in a bit of the classic "back in my day" nostalgia that we all fall prey to now and then. The young people who care very much about the news are still out there. They just want it faster than a newspaper can provide.

I think the reality is that newspapers are, at their very fastest, on a 12 hour news cylce. And that's places that still have a morning and evening paper, 24 hours is the more typical newspaper turnaround.

On the other hand, TV news, internet, and even radio are on an instantaneous news drip that allows them to provide up to the second information. The current trend among news consumers young and old is to get as much information as fast as possible. That means many of us will check an online news source many times a day rather than be satisfied with paper and ink once a day.

It's not about young people these days so much as it's about the people who recognize that they can get more information from digital sources than they can from print. Even TV news can't break a story as fast as one eye witness tweeting a cell phone video of it can.

Newspapers will all die soon. They simply can't meet the speed demands that tech savvy people expect from their news source.

[Beau Petard]

shas-
"I guess I'll be getting my news from the Lutherville Patch from now on."

Mom Petard always liked the PennySaver! :D

brown2Raven--
I have to respectfully disagree that SunSpot Ravens (&all things NFL ;))(I assume that is to what you refer) has become a ghost town, unless you mean that there is an absence of enjoyable football chat and way too much nonsense. There still appears to be a bunch of quality posters who try to have intelligent discussions about the Ravens, but there also seems to be a LOT more threads that veer off into "You're stupid and so is your opinion" crap. There's one thread that may have been deleted, but it went on for (I think a dozen) pages about why a Pitt fan would bring his family to a Ravens home game, put a Pitt sign on top of Ravens signs, stand up and make an ass of himself, and then have anybody wonder why there might be some extra friction in the stands.

Then one of the so-called Ravens fans starts another thread that goes on and on about how Ravens/Baltimore fans are mostly problem children who start fights at games. There are more examples - I'm still chuckling at the one started by a poster who I'm pretty sure is a Ravens fan that asked why the mods let a lot of non-Ravens-related nonsense by trolls continue to occur. It went on for page after page of non-productive pissing contests, with trolls making baited posts, and when called on them, responded with a "Who? ME???" type of attitude.

And don't get me started with the juvenile mentality that pervades too many of the folks over there.

Point being, SunSpot used to be a great place to discuss the Ravens and the NFL, and for me to learn a bit about football. That era has ended. I migrated over here to 24x7, and the difference in the maturity level was immediately apparent. What I'm pleased with is that guys like FilmStudy and B-ravor have been kind enough to offer their stuff here on topics like game analysis and CAP issues, and that does not mean to minimize the other folks here who post a lot of very insightful opinions and analyses of what the Ravens are doing. I just find it much more easy and enjoyable to not have to wade through pages of bullshit threads and trolls to find a dcecent discussion on what happened v. the Titans, or what's an objective assessment of the offense and their inconsistencies, etc.

I guess this is also a good place to give a Merci Beaucoup to the mods and admins here for keeping the riff-raff out without squelching dissenting opinions. Thanks, guys! (and ladies, if there are female "enforcers:D ;))

[HoustonRaven]

I'm a neanderhal - I still read my local paper and the WSJ every day.

I do too .... their online versions. :D

I just commented today to my fiancee how much I enjoy sitting in the quiet house on Sunday morning and reading the news over a cup of coffee.

Its just now instead of getting paper ink all over my fingers, I'm using an iPad.

[paulie]

I agree...
the younger generation uses, reads and values the "news" differently.
My assistant is 22. She "follow" 50 billion peoples twitter feeds...
and she gets her news updates via text from - Hotmail?
She doesnt bother to read news articles unless I ask her to do so.
Maybe its a product of her age, But I always read the Sunday paper and or watched the news. Its seems that "new's" today is really celebrity sightings.

Not much for Facebook or Twitter (though
I do follow Aaron Wilson there), but I
believe that print news is pretty much dead.
The in depth coverage in the news mags is
still worth a read. Not sure that TV news is
much better, very shallow and frequently too
interested in being first to ever bother being
accurate. Guess I've become an online person
- Huffington Post, CNN, BBC World, Reuters
direct feed, API direct. Getting very hard
these days to find coverage that is neutral
or balanced.