News aggregator

An ominous shift for newspapers: Kroger ads go all-digital

The Rural Blog - 9 hours 6 min ago
CNN photo
Kroger, the nation's largest supermarket chain by revenue and a major presence in rural America, announced it is eliminating its long-running newspaper print ads, reports Nathaniel Meyersohn of CNN. "The ads for Kroger stores and subsidiaries, including Ralphs, Fred Meyer and King Soopers, will shift online. Printed copies will be available in stores, the company said." Kroger explained its decision on Twitter: "As a result of declining newspaper circulation and many of our partners reducing or eliminating physical distribution of their newspapers, we're changing the way we get our circular to our customers to ensure they're receiving it." The announcement coincides with the plan of Lee Enterprises, a major national newspaper chain, to reduce most of its papers' print editions to thrice a week.

Not all newspapers have digital platforms, and print ads from groceries have long been one of their biggest revenue sources, if not the biggest. Peter Imes, the publisher of The Commercial Dispatch in Columbus, Mississippi (which ran a story about the change), told Meyerson, "The loss of the Kroger circulars is a loss for both the paper and our readers." Meyersohn reports, "Kroger is the latest company to discontinue its weekly circular ads. Some companies, such as Walgreens stopped printing coupon catalogs and moved their weekly advertisements online. CVS stopped printing them for newspapers, but some are still in stores." Despite many companies opting for digital only, an unhappy Kroger shopper echoed on Twitter what studies have already shown: "I hate that the ads are going digital. CVS did that, and I very seldom look at it. Nor do I go there as often as I used to. It's a pain in the butt to read digital ads."
Kroger's Twitter post generated negative responses from customers pointing out that "digital only" leaves some people out of the equation: "My 79-year-old mother relies on the printed ad to make her grocery list. You're disregarding the elderly & those who don't have the capability to use apps. Just another business decision to show older customers you don't care for their business." Meyersohn adds, "According to Pew Research Center, 39% of people 65 and over do not own a smartphone, and 25% don't use the internet. Additionally, 24% of adults with household incomes below $30,000 a year don't own a smartphone, while 41% don't have a computer. . . . A Stanford University study in 2006 found that at least 10% of shoppers chose their store based on the week's ads and that shoppers were most influenced when the ads promoted discounts on cereal, chips, pizza, cookies and hot dogs."

At a time when inflation and producer profit-boosting have increased grocery prices, the loss of print ads is especially painful. Meyersohn reports, "This means that millions of older and low-income shoppers — the people who often depend on promotions the most to stretch their dollars — will be shut out of online deals." Edgar Dworsky, a consumer advocate and founder of Consumer World, told Meyerson, "This becomes inconvenient for shoppers who, up until now, could do easy comparison shopping just by flipping the pages of competing stores' circulars at their kitchen table."

Local broadcast news has issues, too: Sinclair closes five of its newsrooms; all the markets have other TV stations

The Rural Blog - 9 hours 30 min ago

TV NewsCheck image
Sinclair Broadcast Group announced it's closing five of its local news markets. The company will "cease all local news broadcasts after layoffs eliminated most or all of their respective news teams in two weeks," reports Michael Stahl of TV NewsCheck. "The affected stations are WNWO, Toledo, Ohio; KTVL, Medford, Ore.; KPTM, Omaha, Neb.; WGFL, Gainesville, Fla.; and KPTH, Sioux City, Iowa. . . . . Instead of regularly scheduled local news, starting May 15, the stations will air The National Desk, programming that, according to a Sinclair statement, 'provides real-time national and regional news from Sinclair's television stations across the U.S.'. . . . Recent layoffs in Sinclair newsrooms have not been limited to these five stations ending all-local news broadcasts."

The markets with these closures have other TV stations, but as one former employee noted to Stahl, "It's a huge blow to a very vulnerable group of people. . . . Some of the most impoverished citizens in the country. . . . Free local news is paramount for many of our elderly and poor to stay aware, safe and educated. Information is power, and we just turned the lights off for many."

Sinclair, which has a large rural audience, did not announce the number of employees laid off. "Some of them may be reassigned to other positions within the company," Stahl explains. "According to a local digital publication in Oregon, Medford Alert, Sinclair is expected to reveal more details about the layoffs prior to the news broadcast changeover." One former news team member told him, "I'm still in shock and just really sad. . . .We were all in a room together when a person from Sinclair announced news was not meeting ratings expectations and, therefore, not appealing to high-dollar sponsorships."

The closings appear to be fallout from Sinclair's overall financial struggles. "Diamond Sports Group, a regional sports broadcast company owned by Sinclair, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy," Stahl reports. "According to a CBS News report from March 15, Diamond 'is negotiating a new agreement that will eliminate most of its roughly $8.67 billion debt.' . . . CBS blamed much of Diamond's financial woes on the Covid-19 pandemic, which shut down professional sports for a time in 2020. . . . . Local news is also paying the price." One axed employee told Stahl, "Very valid issues and complaints have been brought up against major corporations for doing the things that they're doing right now within the news business. . . . To know that there is a big story out there right now. . . . and not be able to [report it] is a challenge because the public deserves to know. I have my hands tied. It's painful."

Flora/fauna nips: 4 apps to know them all; bunny rescues; Schmidt Sting Pain Index has marvelous descriptions

The Rural Blog - 10 hours 5 min ago

Image from Justin Schmidt's 2016 book The Sting of the Wild
Ever considered ranking the pain of insect stings? Entomologist Justin Schmidt did. He poetically described and ranked stinging powers from 'spicy' to 'shockingly electric' on his Schmidt Sting Pain Index, reports Lauren Young of Atlas Obscura. After being stung by a "fierce black polybia wasp," he had this to say. "A ritual gone wrong, satanic. The gas lamp in the old church explodes in your face when you light it." The index is featured in Schmidt's 2016 book The Sting of the Wild.

Arbor Day may have passed, but loving trees is timeless. Here's a delightfully deciduous list of tree reads. "Trees are fascinating: The oldest living organism on Earth is a tree, and forest biomes cover one-third of the Earth's surface. Trees provide fruit, spices, nuts, timber, shade, habitats, and oxygen, as well as absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."--Trees: An Illustrated Celebration by Kelsey Oseid.

Male Eastern Box Turtle (Box Turtle Conservation photo)
Box turtles need our help. "Various factors, most of them human-related such as exports for the pet trade and loss of habitat are causing the population of box turtles to dwindle. . . . If you do take a box turtle as a pet, do plenty of research in advance to know exactly what its needs are. The Box Turtle Conservation website is a great place to start. Another great resource to follow is Reptile.Guide.

Every flower, every plant, every tree: These four apps can help you identify them all, reports Michael J. Coren of The Washington Post. "Thanks to artificial intelligence trained on millions of observations, anyone with a smartphone can snap a picture or record a sound to identify tens of thousands of species, from field bluebells to native bumblebees. . . . I'm now on a first-name basis with most of my wild neighbors. It has reconnected me to a natural world I love, yet never studied deeply enough to know all its characters and settings. . . . The easiest to use is Seek."

Some rabbits have been rescued from tree branches.
(Photo by Eric Hopson, San Luis National Wildlife Refuge ) California's record-setting snowpack melt is great for ducks and fish. "Still for other animals, the rising waters are perilous. Just ask the bunnies," reports Lauren Sommer of NPR. "In the Central Valley, evacuations are underway for endangered riparian brush rabbits. The small brown cottontails, only about a foot long, are finding themselves stranded on small areas of dry land as nearby rivers overtop their banks. . . . A team from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has captured and moved more than 360 rabbits to higher ground to protect a species that's coming back from the brink of extinction."

Radioactive dogs? "What we can learn from Chernobyl's strays . . . They've lived and bred inside the Exclusion Zone for generations—and scientists believe their DNA may transform our knowledge about the effects of radiation," reports Sharon Guynup of National Geographic. Elaine Ostrander, who runs the Dog Genome Project at the National Human Genome Research Institute, told her, "These Chernobyl dogs are valuable to science because they've lived and evolved in isolation for 15 generations since the disaster. They die young, by three or four years old; 10 to 12 is normal for 75-pound dogs. . . . Ultimately, we want to know what happened to the genomic DNA that allowed [the dogs] to live and breed and survive in a radioactive environment."

How old must "a cultivar" be to be considered an heirloom? "Some experts say it is those that existed before 1951, when the first hybrid vegetable cultivars were developed. Others define it as any cultivar dating to 1940 or before. . . . Heirlooms are plant cultivars (cultivated varieties) that have been grown for decades, even centuries, and their seeds saved and passed down through families or communities," reports Therese Ciesinski of Lancaster Farming. "Heirlooms have a lot more going for them than simply adaptation. They are time-tested, with intense flavors that surpass anything at the supermarket. They are often more nutritious. You can save the seeds and grow the variety in the future . . . And growing heirlooms help preserve biodiversity and history."

Progressive Farmer columnist highlights The Economist's highly positive report on the American economy

The Rural Blog - 10 hours 53 min ago
By Urban Lehner
Editor Emeritus, Progressive Farmer

China's leader Xi Jinping sees the United States as a nation in decline. So do many Americans. It's not surprising, then, that The Economist's April 15 cover story commanded so much attention; for in four deeply reported pages, the Economist presents a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Anxiety over America's decline, the editors conclude, "obscures a stunning success story -- one of enduring but underappreciated outperformance. America remains the world's richest, most productive and most innovative big economy. Along an impressive number of dimensions, it is leaving its peers further in the dust."

This challenge to conventional wisdom has energized pundits. The New York Times ran two op-ed commentaries on consecutive days. One, by conservative columnist David Brooks, agreed with The Economist, concluding that for all American capitalism's faults, "It has proved superior to all real world alternatives." The other, by progressive economist Paul Krugman, cautioned: "The numbers aren't really as good as they look, and there are shadows over America that aren't captured by gross domestic product."

Agree or disagree with the Economist's conclusion, its evidence is impressive:
-- In 1990, the gross domestic product of the U.S. represented 25% of the world's total. Despite the rise of China, the U.S. still accounts for 25% of the world's economic output.
-- Compared to its counterparts in the G-7, a group that includes Japan and Germany, the U.S. share is growing. Adjusted for purchasing power, the U.S. accounts for 51% of G-7 GDP, up from 43% in 1990.
-- America's income per person was 24% higher than Western Europe's in 1990. It's 30% higher today.
-- Between 1990 and 2022, labor productivity (output per hour worked) rose 67% in the U.S., 55% in Europe and 51% in Japan.
-- U.S. spending on research and development has risen over the past decade to 3.5% of GDP, well ahead of most countries.
-- America spends 37% more on education per pupil than the 23 other rich countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and 34% of Americans have completed tertiary education, a proportion exceeded only by Singapore.

And this is only a partial list. The magazine cites other evidence, including statistics showing Americans are more mobile, start more businesses and have much stronger and deeper financial markets. (The magazine doesn't mention another American strength: its highly productive agriculture and food system.)

The Economist concedes there are negatives, particularly income inequality. A lot of the growth in U.S. income per capita went to the "ultra rich," who the magazine says have done "ultra well." At 77 years, Americans' life expectancy is five years shorter than in other rich countries, in part because America's poor get poor medical care.

Yet while the U.S. has the most unequal income distribution in the G-7, the Economist also notes that "a trucker in Oklahoma can earn more than a doctor in Portugal."

Presidents usually get credit for strong economies but the Economist implicitly criticizes both Biden and Trump, warning that their turn to protectionism and industrial policy risks squandering America's strengths.

Income inequality and lower life expectancies are among the negatives Krugman plays up. "Do we care," he asks, "that the rich can afford more and bigger superyachts?" Krugman also argues that while Europe lags the U.S. economically, Europeans enjoy a higher quality of life. Their long vacations give them a better work-life balance.

Unfortunately, in focusing on GDP's limitations as a measuring rod, Krugman ignores the many other dimensions on which the Economist rates the American economy highly.

Moreover, the tradeoff between European and American capitalism is broader than vacations. Brooks calls it "the tension between economic dynamism and economic security." American capitalism, he says, "has always been tilted toward dynamism." And even though this tilt has weakened as U.S. social spending increased, the U.S. economy continues to outperform.

On one thing both Times' pundits agree: American society is a mess. In Brooks' words, "We've lived through a wretched political era. The social fabric is fraying in a thousand ways." No doubt this fraying contributes to the feeling so many have that America is in decline.

There were similar feelings in the 1980s when Japan was on the rise. By the mid-1990s, it was clear those feelings were overwrought.

Will history repeat itself? Today's challenges, external and domestic, may be more serious. Still, by pointing out America's continuing strengths, the Economist has contributed a fresh and helpful perspective.

Baltimore bill would make it 'unlawful' to purposefully not use someone's preferred pronouns in certain cases

Newsalert - 13 hours 42 min ago

Baltimore bill would make it 'unlawful' to purposefully not use someone's preferred pronouns in certain cases https://t.co/Q9k4yMQfOe

— FOX Baltimore (@FOXBaltimore) May 4, 2023
Categories: News and Links

Gaslighters: Progressives insist it's a conspiracy theory they'd ban gas stoves

Newsalert - 13 hours 44 min ago

SUPERCUT!

Gaslighters: Progressives insist it's a conspiracy theory they'd ban gas stoves pic.twitter.com/IPvXRuocFT

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 5, 2023
Categories: News and Links

Sanders’s $17 minimum wage proposal creates political headache for Schumer

Newsalert - 13 hours 56 min ago

Sanders’s $17 minimum wage proposal creates political headache for Schumer https://t.co/LphX5anjai pic.twitter.com/E7ZsGj3ej8

— Democrats (@democrats) May 5, 2023
Categories: News and Links

Colorado teachers' union claims capitalism 'inherently exploits children, public schools' and fails to address 'systemic racism,' 'patriarchy'

Newsalert - 13 hours 57 min ago
They really are socialists...

Colorado teachers' union claims capitalism 'inherently exploits children, public schools' and fails to address 'systemic racism,' 'patriarchy' https://t.co/4AqMJcp47o

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) May 5, 2023
Categories: News and Links

Jordan Neely also had numerous arrests on his rap sheet, the most recent in 2021, when he socked an older woman in the head, severely injuring her and landing himself in jail for more than a year

Newsalert - 13 hours 59 min ago
Does AOC want to defend this???

Jordan Neely also had numerous arrests on his rap sheet, the most recent in 2021, when he socked an older woman in the head, severely injuring her and landing himself in jail for more than a yearhttps://t.co/Kj2v6FoINJ

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) May 5, 2023
Categories: News and Links

Outbursts and anger at South Shore High School migrant meeting. Chicago attempting to give a presentation but attendees interrupting city leaders in opposition to plan.

Newsalert - 14 hours 53 sec ago

Outbursts and anger at South Shore High School migrant meeting. City attempting to give a presentation but attendees interrupting city leaders in opposition to plan. @WGNNews pic.twitter.com/EZnZzrUehu

— Dana Rebik (@DanaRebikWGN) May 4, 2023
Categories: News and Links

Nets Ignore BOMBSHELL Report Implicating Biden in Bribery Scheme

Newsalert - 14 hours 2 min ago

Nets Ignore BOMBSHELL Report Implicating Biden in Bribery Scheme https://t.co/TWOuJkJpuX

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) May 5, 2023
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Male pedophile who subjected his 7-year-old daughter to 'a vortex of darkness' is in a women's prison thanks to the ACLU

Newsalert - 14 hours 3 min ago

Male pedophile who subjected his 7-year-old daughter to 'a vortex of darkness' is in a women's prison thanks to the ACLU https://t.co/MekF4PHjeK

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) May 5, 2023
Categories: News and Links

Gov. Kathy Hochul said Jordan Neely was "killed for being a passenger on the subway trains." |

Newsalert - 14 hours 4 min ago

.@GovKathyHochul said Jordan Neely was "killed for being a passenger on the subway trains." | @ariblaff https://t.co/LZweBtFGSi

— National Review (@NRO) May 5, 2023
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Even After Capture, ABC/CBS Refuse to Say Texas Shooter Deported 4X

Newsalert - 14 hours 6 min ago

Even After Capture, ABC/CBS Refuse to Say Texas Shooter Deported 4X https://t.co/GOYij3dh2a

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) May 5, 2023
Categories: News and Links

Milley’s replacement thinks we shouldn’t use the words Mom and Dad.

Newsalert - 14 hours 9 min ago

Milley’s replacement thinks we shouldn’t use the words Mom and Dad. https://t.co/slps7H3sVs

— Matt Lohmeier (@matthewlohmeier) May 5, 2023
Categories: News and Links

Sen. Bernie Sanders pushes for $17 per hour federal minimum wage, 32-hour work week

Newsalert - 14 hours 10 min ago
You'll be seeing less workers at fast food joints if this passes...

Sen. Bernie Sanders pushes for $17 per hour federal minimum wage, 32-hour work week https://t.co/mg875okb19

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) May 5, 2023
Categories: News and Links

Murderer, selected by Dems to serve on county prison board, now charged with stealing nearly $100K in COVID funds

Newsalert - 14 hours 12 min ago

Murderer, selected by Dems to serve on county prison board, now charged with stealing nearly $100K in COVID funds https://t.co/qqn9ylmqDm

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) May 5, 2023
Categories: News and Links

Was The Tucker "Take Down" A Deep-State Hit?

Newsalert - 14 hours 13 min ago

Was The Tucker "Take Down" A Deep-State Hit? https://t.co/6NzhREmk86

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 5, 2023
Categories: News and Links

Restrictions On Ivermectin Dropped In Australia

Newsalert - 14 hours 16 min ago

Restrictions On Ivermectin Dropped In Australia https://t.co/WNRs5Kng4r

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 5, 2023
Categories: News and Links