Lost Newspaper: “Spokesman Review”
It came as a great shock to us here at the library when the Spokane, Washington newspaper, “Spokesman Review,” decided it would no longer mail its publication; home delivery or the Internet will be the only options.
Now I understand about budget cuts, but really? What about all of those who don’t have access to the Internet, or just really want to hold it in their hands and they don’t live in the home delivery area?
Well, the inmates of the Washington Department of Corrections fall into that category (NO INTERNET). So along with all the inmates losing their personal subscriptions, we here in the library did as well. So even as we strive to provide the inmates with a touch of home news we have lost one of our more populated areas, Spokane.
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August 26th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Many of the inmates at CRCC were effected by this also. We are just an hour and a half from Spokane and have many residents incarcerated here. Two offenders asked if I could download the newspaper every day and load it on one of the library’s computers. It’s not something we can do at this time, but I suppose it might be an option to explore in the future if more newspapers drop print format.
August 30th, 2009 at 10:38 am
The Spokesman Review offers a subscription to a digital edition. It is visually identical to the print version. I’m guessing it could be printed out too.
http://spokesmanreview.newsstand.com/
September 1st, 2009 at 6:13 pm
The Spokesman Review is also available online through ProQuest. The paper is generally available there by the next day. If you were actually contemplating making a printout of the paper, this might be an easier way to do it, since I think you could set up an alert which would e-mail all of the articles to you every day. Of course, they’d just be ASCII text, with no formatting, and no pictures. And you wouldn’t get any of the ads, comics, boxed scores, etc. Primarily just the locally originated articles (even some of the syndicated content may be stripped out, if the paper doesn’t have the rights to provide that content to ProQuest.) Just a thought.
Will
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:05 am
Thanks Will for the information. We definitly use Proquest for older publications, didn’t think about it being available so fast. This may be an option for getting the basic information out there, however, sometimes the most popular part of the paper is the classified (housing and jobs) and of course sports. As times change we will just have to continue to adjust and do the best we can to continue to provide information to our patrons.