Old News

As a consumer of the newspaper in paper and online form, I find that I like the online form more. Have you every struggled to fold back the paper to its original form? It’s almost impossible. You also get those dirty ink smudges from the paper form. And you have to flip through pages of ads before you get to some actual news. I picked up a San Jose Mercury newspaper, today.

The only pros from paper form is that you get the comics,coupons or inserts like “Your guide to Bay Area Events Calendar” or the “Eye”. The Eye is an insert that is published once a week. It writes about the low down on entertainment.

There are bigger differences between the Mercury news online and paper, other then a few ink smears, or your paper drowning in a sea of ads. For the paper version, the front page sections are huge, colored, and centered. The inside paper, if there are any pictures, they are small, and in black and white. The sections’ main pictures have captions. For the online version, there are colored mini-pictures.

The newspaper in print form makes money from its ads. So does the online version, but the ads are more discrete online. I think because readers get turned off by the in your face ads. I think it is a strategic move on the newspaper's part because readers can access other papers online if there are too many ads on a news site. But for the paper form, people have already bought it. The readers using paper forms are probably used to all the ads. And if they want the paper form, they only have a few publications in paper form that they can get their hands on.

Also, the ads in paper form comes from local businesses while onlne form comes from almost anywhere, and almost anything (except graphic, sexual ads).

For the online version, the “big” stories are not placed in order because the stories change every so often when you go to Mercury’s main news page. The main picture is small. Below the picture, there are many headlines you can click on and be directed to it. I find this way better then shuffling through papers to get to something that interests me. I think paper form will become old news because it will people are going online for their news, nowadays. Online and newsprint had different products advertising.

I don’t hate paper form newspaper but I rather use the online form of San Jose Mercury news because it is easier to use. Or it is because I’m lazy and want to work as little as possible to get my news. And that is why I watch news on TV but that’s another story.