Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Indianapolis Colts, Week 8, in beagle haiku, plus some newspaper whining

Katie the Beagle
Thinks Indy's Niner win is
Nothing to bark at.

--Mary Campbell-Droze


Sadly, these 17 syllables aren't much less informative than the full game report in my Monday paper. Or, rather, in my Monday no-paper, since the Detroit Free Press is only home-delivered on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, and the paper itself continues to shrink while growing ever-more-expensive at the stands. The dead-tree edition of Monday's full paper ran 30 pages and cost a full dollar.

And for the last week or so their iPhone/Mobile edition has been broken, so that you can only read the top ten or so stories.

Quite honestly, I'm considering replacing the whole thing with a Xeroxed single page of haiku. You may think this is a bad business model, but I don't see how it's worse than building a news business model based on not providing news to your readers. And as near as I can tell, that has become the Free Press's business model.

I was willing to follow them into their digital experiment, since the proposal was that they would provide all the news they used to, just in a different format. But I'm increasingly wondering where the news went.

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