To casual observers, the Sunday edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel looks like a gold mine: all those advertising inserts that tumble out from the paper. But they are actually a bad sign, because these are all advertisers no longer willing to buy display ads within the paper and only paying the much cheaper “insert” fee to be tucked into the paper. “From the advertiser’s point of view,” [NYU Professor Clay] Shirky writes, “the nation’s newspapers have become little more than a blue-bag delivery service, with a horoscope and enough local sports inside to get people to open the bag.”
Via The Inevitable Decline of the Journal Sentinel @ Urban Milwaukee’s Murphy’s Law.