Like Atrios says, Mark Sanford’s home state paper has done remarkably good work on this story. I know paper is dying and all that. Subscribe anyway. Paying a few bucks for a neighborhood kid to toss The State in your flower bed every morning will make a nice counter-point to the wingnuts who are no doubt screaming at their interns all day.
Also, I do not want the last newspaper on Earth to be the New York Post.
David Atkins
I subscribe to my local paper the Ventura County Star. People should support their local papers.
DougJ
The NY Post is supposed to go under any day now.
Tim F.
One the one hand, great. On the other hand wingnuts seem to have their own right-to-work Constitutional amendment, so the Posties will almost certainly stink up
some other paperFred Hiatt’s rag.linda
rupert loses tens of millions annually on the nypost.
Zifnab
@linda: Makes you wonder where the hell he doesn’t lose money.
Brian Griffin
I always liked the State when working in Columbia. And I liked their reporters whenever I talked to them after meetings. One had just gotten back from Iraq– it was the early days of the invasion, and he’d been imbedded– he was very glad to be home. they all reminded me of the old-school journalists I used to drink with in Chicago: out there to do the work.
Brian J
Where did you hear that? As a lot of people know, he’s been losing money on the paper for years. He might have broken even for a few years or eve squeezed out a small profit, at least before the advertising crash. Regardless, though, I don’t think the paper and therefore his situation has changed that much. Unless you think that his ownership of The Wall Street Journal and some other, very small local papers means he no longer needs the Post for access into the media market, I don’t see why he would shut it down now. In fact, the latest rumor has him buying the New York Daily News.
I think the far more interesting, although far less likely, situation involves him trying to buy The New York Times while his people at The Journal are trying to knock the wind out of The Times in every direction. Would he still want it, if only to reap every last cent of efficiency out of the market, or would he simply adopt all of its habits and then watch it die?
passerby
I’ll pass on a subscription to The State but you know something, The Chattanooga Times Free Press throws me the paper daily (though i only pay for weekends) and I’ve recently gotten into the habit of actually paging thru it instead of just fishing out the crossword and tossing the rest.
I was initially turned off by what I thought was waaaay too much church news content (it’s slap full of it), and ignorantly thought it was just a red state rag but, I’ve discovered that they have a nice balance of opinion not only in the Op/Ed but in their selection of AP writers and a nice line up of local feature reporters.
A cup of coffee and reading the paper on my front porch–vs my usual and somewhat stale and predictable internet rounds–has become my new favorite thing. Like old times. So, ditto TimF.
HumboldtBlue
I began my East Coast liberal media elite career with them, even though it’s a West Coast right-of-center paper.
And Tim? Umm, why should I subscribe to a paper more than 3,000 miles away? Seems like the paper boy/girl would have to use one of Pelosi’s taxpayer funded airliners to get it to my doorstep.
Perry Como
Can I pay for a subscription that tosses a copy in Mark Sanford’s flower bed every day?
Commercial: “For x cents a day, you too can enjoy a lot of lulz.”
JenJen
O/T, but OMFG, Glenn Beck reaches new heights of hysterical insanity I didn’t think attainable, even for him. He’s going to require another round of ass surgery after this outburst:
Caller Reduces Glenn Beck To High-Pitched Hissy Fit
Holy shit. You’ve gotta go listen to this. GET OFF MY PHONE!! GET OFF MY PHONE YOU LITTLE PINHEAD!!
Kiril
OT, but
Ann Coulter banner ad up top. An ad for Sarah Palin’s SarahPAC. A T-shirt ad for Gazonga State University (“Go Knockers!”). An ad for the ultimate guide to meeting Thai women.
To be fair, there’s a petmedia ad and some stuff from Amazon which actually seems to fit.
But seriously, I know the blog has no control over the ads
and they’re basically placed there by a service. But doesn’t that service do anything to match the ads to the audience? I mean, that Coulter ad has been there forever.
Unless…these ads are getting click-throughs.
Who are all you people?!?
geg6
Let me preface this by saying my mother the newspaper reporter would be very pissed if she was alive. Why, you ask? Well, I quit subscribing to our local paper, her long time employer. The only thing it still does well is local sports. The rest of it is nothing but advertising and wingnut letters to the editor. Can’t stand it, so I read the obits (yes, I’m that old) and sports online. I get the Pgh. Post-Gazette on weekends only. And there’s no goddam way I put one fucking cent in Richard Mellon Scaife’s pocket by buying the Tribune-Review. Hell, I won’t even access it online so as to not give that crazy bastard a page hit.
Perry Como
My friends call me Running Bear.
The Grand Panjandrum
OT: TimF and DougJ you’ll appreciate this: Bill Gates bought the rights to THE Feyman Lecture Series (1964 lectures filmed by BBC) and put them online with free access.
For those of you who enjoy science but have never seen them they are a must view.
SGEW
@The Grand Panjandrum: Bill Gates does good! Maybe we won’t put him first against the wall when the revolution comes, after all . . .
[eta: Gah! I clicked your link and it started to try to download and install a Microsoft program on to my precious Microsoft-free computer! WTF, mate? Is this some kind of cruel trap?!]
EL
I wish some of these papers would put up a “donate” button. I’d directly reward such papers for good articles. I wished McClatchy had buttons up for particular articles.
Heck, I’d toss the NYT a fair amount over a year, if they had button linked to paypal.
Tim F.
I’m such a nerd that I already own the CD audio set, at least of his introductory physics lectures at CalTech. I bring them out when I need to explain to a new kid the difference between speaking clearly and losing your accent.
Joy
OK, I ponied up. It could make for some great reading. The paper has been doing a great job. I live 1000 (I think, Springfield Illinois) miles away, but I venture I would get more information from The State than I would my hometown paper, The State Journal Register. It’s a farce and I pay a lot more for it but you’ve got to have something to read while eating cereal in the morning.
RPh
No, you really do not want the last paper on Earth to be the
Scaife ScreedGreensburgh Tribune-ReivewPittsburgh Tribune ReviewHyperIon
@Kiril: i think ad blocker is the way to go. i don’t think the proprietor sees the ads as a big deal. maybe he has ad blocker. ;=)
Anne Laurie
The NYTimes bought the Boston Globe some 15 years ago with the not-so-secret goal of eliminating a “regional rival”. They didn’t quite succeed, although they did discourage a ton of metro-area subscribers — stuff like pushing morning deliveries back past suburban commuting deadlines & then failing to stock vending boxes at the train/bus stops until 10am. Now the Sulzburgers are desperately trying to flog what’s left of the Globe to anyone who’ll take it in an attempt to prop up their flagpoles, I mean flagship. If Murdoch succeeds in killing the NYTimes, it will stand as a textbook example of business-world kharmic justice.
Anne Laurie
Perry Como wins tonite’s internets!
Batocchio
Your last sentence is a compelling argument.
Ejoiner
We just dropped our subscription to the State – it has in the past few months shrunk to the size and thickness of a basic ad flyer (especially the Monday edition). While its still around we’ll grab a Sunday edition but I figure that will be gone soon enough as well.
Leo
But wait….isn’t the State the very same paper who sat on the emails from December until the good guv went MIA? Thx, but no thx!