And we're back up

Ain’t happening

Nothing wrong with the modem, it turns out: service provider problem.

In the meantime, I see that Greenwich Time is following through with its threat to move much of its local news behind a cash wall; good luck with that. I understand the need for a publisher to generate cash to pay reporters, but readers have to be convinced that the content is worth paying for before they’ll part with their money. Nothing I’ve seen in our local paper over the past couple of decades has ever persuaded me to pay up.

Next.

UPDATE: Arcticle on the future of local newspapers in today’s WSJ. It’s not encouraging:

The shrinking of the local news landscape is leaving Americans with less information about what's happening close to them, a fact Facebook recently acknowledged as it struggled to expand its local-news product but couldn’t find enough stories. Local TV news is still a major, if declining, source of news for Americans, but local newspapers are vanishing.

“It’s hard to see a future where newspapers persist,” said Nicco Mele, director of the Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, who predicts that half of the surviving newspapers will be gone by 2021.