Douglas_Knight comments on Open Thread, November 16–30, 2012 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: VincentYu 18 November 2012 01:59PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 19 November 2012 06:04:08PM 3 points [-]

Have you ever lived in a place with free newspapers? Nowhere near 10% read them.

Comment author: ZoneSeek 19 November 2012 06:28:32PM *  1 point [-]

They give away the fat Sunday edition at the park where I jog. And yeah, I shelved it, read a few pages a week later, then tossed it. I agree, low impact, and paper is low status. Cool people are on the internet.

Comment author: Emily 19 November 2012 09:17:08PM 0 points [-]

I agree, but one factor here might be that they are generally really bad - boring, poorly-written local news amid scads of badly-designed adverts. You might easily be able to get somewhat higher numbers by having consistently interesting content.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 19 November 2012 10:35:21PM 1 point [-]

Maybe the typical free paper is bad, but the best papers, such as the Chicago Reader and the Onion, are free.

Comment author: Emily 20 November 2012 12:51:40PM 0 points [-]

I'm not familiar with the Chicago Reader (I'm British), and I had no idea there was a paper version of the Onion! Do they have decent readerships? If so that supports the notion that good free papers can get people to read them.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 20 November 2012 03:58:43PM 0 points [-]

The Onion has been scaling back, though things can't be that bad in print if they were trying to expand to Toronto just last year.