This Time, It's Goodbye
Dear The Age,
I’ve read you since I was a kid; I’m forty now, so of course I’ve changed, but so has the world.
In the past couple of years I’ve started to devour online media, and you, from being my starting-point, have slipped to becoming an occasional click for sports news (though the little paper and many others do it so much better) and the weather.
Your website is covered with intrusive, bandwidth-hungry animated ads, your search function is a joke, and it is impossible to get involved in comment/conversation, or to be part of the community that the rest of the online world so happily is.
The only reason I buy you these days (from being a full-week subscriber I’m now a once or twice a week buyer) is to do DA’s crossword and Leaping Larry's Letters on Saturdays, and sometimes for the sudoku on the train when I’ve forgotten my headphones.
Why did I stick with you for so long, and what happened? I guess thirty years of habit, plus the fact that the Little Paper is simply unreadable, but really, what do you have to keep me interested? Up to date news I can get anywhere, opinion I can write myself or go to blogs and opinion sites whose agenda is either non-existent or at least stated boldly up front.
This isn’t meant to be a long-winded “I know everything, print is dead” treatise, I am simply trying to explain to why I just have to give up on you now.
I’ve hated Catherine Deveny’s hypocritical, bigoted rants for years, but these days there just isn’t enough else in you to keep me interested. The rest of you has become so bland and corporate and pointless, and your web presence is such a tragic example of why old media is dying, that my commitment to you just has to end.
I’m only one reader, I know, but for every loud-mouthed git like me, there are thousands more who just walk quietly away, never to be seen again. You should listen, but you won’t, and that’s why I’m leaving you. Goodbye.
Justin Shaw
Co Editor
The King’s Tribune
P.S. I don’t know if this has been sent to the right department, your Contact Us section is as bad as the rest of your website.
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