Do you know what I really miss? As, by the way, the voice is still not back. I'm working my way through this incredible cold and a damn, something popped up on the computer that you could hear, but I'm not heading it out because I'm not feeling well. I crawled out of bed to do this podcast, so here I am.
Good morning, Americans. It's Friday. And on The Daily Grateful Today, I'm going to talk about newspapers. How grateful I am to have grown up in a time where we had daily newspapers and why they all seem to have gone away.
I mean, damn. Anyway, let's just do this. So I read an article about why newspapers are gone. I have to tell you, I remember having a newspaper delivered, well, even in this house, in this house, when I first bought this house 18, 19 years ago, heading up to 19 years ago, I bought this house, and one of the things that I did every morning is I had the St.
Petersburg Times delivered to the house, or that delivered to the last house. As a matter of fact, I always had a daily paper in the Tampa Bay area where I live. At one time, we had the St. Petersburg Times, and then they also owned a second newspaper called The Evening Independent, which was the, it came out at 4 o'clock.
Every day. So you got news twice a day coming to you on a newspaper if you wanted it. Across the bay, they had the Tampa Tribune, and then they had the Tampa Bay Times, which was the afternoon newspaper. And in Clearwater, where I live, we had the Clearwater Sun, which was an afternoon paper.
They did not publish on Saturdays, but they published a Sunday morning paper. And I used to get the St. Petersburg Times delivered every morning, and this was years ago, and I also got the Clearwater Sun delivered every afternoon. And the Clearwater Sun was a very, very local daily newspaper, and it was filled with all local news.
Now, the Clearwater Sun finally went away because the St. Petersburg Times essentially killed it. I'm going to sneeze in a minute. I will try and shut the microphone off before I do that.
But I feel one coming on. And when one comes on, about five more, join it. Anyway, once the Clearwater Sun went away, I would read just the St. Petersburg Times.
And because I felt as though they had killed the Clearwater Sun, I wasn't going to read The Evening Independent. And The Evening Independent, they eventually shut it down. But with the St. Petersburg Times, I would every morning bring it in, lay it on the dining room table, open it up.
And by the way, when I had kids living at home, everybody knew not to mess with Daddy's newspaper until he was done with it. Everybody knew that. Can I have a section? Don't even ask me if you could have a section.
And I would open up, the first page was all national news. The first section of the paper was all national news and financial news. And I would read that because I was a news junkie, still am. Then the second section was called City and State.
And that was all very local news. And I liked that a lot. I would do that. And then they had a third section, especially after they killed the Clearwater Sun, called the Clearwater Times, which was just strictly, it's a small section, but it was strictly all the news that the Clearwater Sun used to publish.
And the St. Petersburg Times was now publishing it. And then they had the sports section. Now, at the end of the sports section, they had the comic.
And you could read those. And, you know, that was nice. I like to read Doonesbury. I read every section of that paper except the sports section because I wasn't a sports person.
I would read the comics in there. And I would read some of the ads in there. They had weird ads. But I would, you know, I read all the rest of the paper cover to cover every morning at like 7 o'clock where I would go to work 6.30, 7 o'clock.
I would read the paper cover to cover. I feel as though I became a very well-rounded person by doing that. And I guess it could be argued today that we have a lot more information given to us right here on our screens instantly that is updated instantly and it's probably better. But I really, really, really enjoyed that.
Why did newspapers go away? Well, decline in print advertising revenue was the big thing. Traditional revenue sources like classified ads and display ads moved on to an online platform like Google and Facebook, especially Facebook or local stuff. And Craigslist, the rise of digital news and communication.
I can go right on my phone. Here I have my phone. Right here. I can look up news instantly.
I have, you know, I have apps on there that just give me all kinds of information. Subscription. Now, I can still, the, the, the, the, the Times later decided that they were going to kill the Tampa Tribune and they actually, the Tampa Tribune was doing so poorly anyway that the people who owned it essentially gave it to the St. Petersburg Times and which was then called, they had changed their name.
One of the ways they were going to kill the Tampa Tribune was to change their name to the Tampa Bay Times. And when they got ownership of the Tampa Tribune, they immediately ceased publication. They took the ownership up, I think like on a Tuesday. There was no Wednesday edition of the Tampa Tribune.
None of the writers got to say goodbye. None of the columnists got to say goodbye. It was goodbye. It was just gone.
It was just there one day, gone the next, did not exist anymore. And you know, I got to tell you, younger generations prefer real-time updates. And you know what? I'm the older generation and I guess I do too.
I do miss having that local newspaper. And by the way, it costs a lot of money to print and distribute a daily paper. It really does. And it takes a lot of resource to do that.
It just does. The Tampa Bay Times still exists, but it's only published two days a week. And they don't even do the publishing. It's done by the Lakeland Ledger.
It does the printing now. The St. Petersburg Times or the Tampa Bay Times has closed down their printing plant and sold it. They closed down their editorial offices and sold it.
Now they rent office space. They had a building in Clearwater that they built to help destroy the Clearwater Sun. It was right across the street. And that's gone.
That's been torn down. You can go down there now and you can take, you know, you can look and there's a blank lot where the St. Petersburg Times super building that they built was and then right across the street you can see a concrete slab where the Clearwater Sun used to exist. Are there any more daily papers left in the country?
Well, in Florida, the Miami Herald, I believe, is still publishing daily. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, amazingly enough, still publishes. The Chicago Tribune, the Globe in Boston, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Dallas Morning News. You know, I wonder if the Palm Beach, excuse me, Palm Beach Post, which by the way, was a wonderful newspaper.
Whenever I would go to visit my old girlfriend, Debbie Down in West Palm Beach, I would pick up the Palm Beach Post every morning and read it. I liked it. The Tampa Bay Times, by the way, is only published on Wednesdays and Sundays. And by the way, they're so thin.
But they still publish a daily internet thing, which costs more, by the way. To subscribe to the Tampa Bay Times now online costs more than it did to subscribe to the paper. And it doesn't have near as much information in it as it did when they had a paper, when they had award-winning journalists, when they had award-winning photographers. And then I just stopped.
I just basically stopped because it wasn't worth the value to me. I kind of miss it. I might go back to it. But I have to tell you, a daily newspaper is one of those things that I miss.
What about you? You still get a daily newspaper where you live? What do you think of it? Do you remember what I'm talking about?
Getting up every morning and reading the paper or in the afternoon reading the paper? You know how many people I knew that used to just, I was one of them. We'd constantly read the afternoon paper after having read the morning paper. It was a lot to be a news junkie in those times.
It is a lot to be a news junkie now. If it's easier, I can just look at my iPhone. Bye. We'll see you next week.