A commenter here at Ashvegas says the Asheville Citizen-Times will drop classified advertisements in print two days a week once it starts having the newspaper printed in Greenville, S.C., in January. Can anyone confirm this?
The news comes as newspapers across the country, and most certainly the Citizen-Times, consider each and every option to stem financial losses. Newspapers are cutting pages and entire sections from the print product. Other newspapers are deciding to just not print a newspaper a couple of days each week.
10 Comments
I’m not fond of the use of "some people say" (or,even worse, "they say") in print. I don’t even like to hear it spoken.
Here is one exception: (and this could apply to the "many people say" or "many people believe", also) I welcome those phrases in the context of a story which debunks popular misconceptions or misinformation. In that situation, such phrases are useful and contribute to readers’ understanding of the issues.
I’ll agree that handing out free copies of the paper is normal promotion Quintin, but I will say that this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone from the C-T doing it in Haywood county, quite honestly. The Waynesville Mountaineer has been throwing free copies out in my driveway every few months for years now (haven’t subscribed yet!), but I’ve never seen the C-T handing out free copies here until the other day, so it stood out to me.
Quintin, I hear you, and mostly, I agree. I’ll keep thinking about how to best handle it. I could require people to register with an email, but I think that would cut down drastically on the free flow. I moderate all comments (read them before approving them), so that seems to work for now.
But the weak sourcing can become a real crutch. My pet peeve is the "many people" that WLOSers constantly refer to. They use it so much that it starts to sound like a name to me: "Many People believe blah blah blah…."
That’s a crazy story about the reporter you mention. Dang.
I saw a headline in a newspaper once that read: ‘Some people say’ such and such. Made me laugh, and think how much easier reporting would be if I could just attribute to ‘some people’ … your blog, your decisions, but I like my people to have names. Or, at least something identifying them … blogs are too loosy-goosey for my tastes, I guess.
That was a true story about the reporter I told up above, by the way. He also once had a story notarized before sending it in to ‘prove’ that the editors were adding mistakes.
Quintin, I allow people to remain anonymous when they comment if they so choose, so when I refer to a "commenter" or an "Ashvegas reader," I’m referring to someone who left an anonymous comment on the site. What I’ll start doing is linking to that comment when I refer to it, so people can see it.
That probably still doesn’t address everyone’s concerns about sourcing, but that seems the best way to go for now. And as I like to remind everyone: this is a blog, not a newspaper. This blog mixes opinion and straight-up information. This blog passes along anonymous tips. I’ll keep trying to make distinctions clear, but people need to get over trying to figure out whether or not bloggers are journalists. Instead of asking "who is a commenter," the real question should be something like, "is the information good information?"
They wouldn’t take it for FREE? Let’s assume maybe they already had one at home…
Good Lord, first poster – that’s just promotion and has been done for years, generally by a district manager or someone in circulation. They might or might not be desperate, but what you referred to has nothing to do with anything. That’s just standard business, passing out free copies to try to sign up new subscribers.
Jason, what is a ‘commenter?’ A mole at the paper, a man on the street? The vague reference reminds me of a former reporter at the newspaper (Multimedia days) who, when covering commission meetings, would quote a ‘bystander’ as saying all sorts of things. Stuff like, "That commission chairman is a fool to do such and such," and so on. One day the newspaper got a call from someone – turns out the reporter was saying those things as asides to others at the meetings, then calling himself a bystander in the newspaper … identify your sources better, my old friend …
Probably because they don’t have anyone to run the section anymore.
They were giving the paper away at BiLo the other Sunday as well. I heard three decline. Sheesh. What’s happened?!
Why would they drop a section that is PAID for? That doesn’t make sense or cents.
I don’t know anything about this, but there was a woman at K-mart in Waynesville yesterday handing out free copies of the Citizen-Times to anyone who wanted one. She had a little table set up right inside the entrance. Several people (including me) declined to take one. The C-T must be getting desperate.