I see notes on sites from the DC area that tell me that, yet again, The Washington Post is having to worry about declining circulation numbers. Gee, really? I would never have expected that { read that with dripping sarcasm }.
A couple of thoughts come to mind on how to resolve the problem for The {Washington} Post.
Besides the obvious, which is to look at the editorial content and relatively obvious liberal bias that shows up in the paper, there's an even bigger and simpler reason for some of that declining readership -- it's called 'old news' and it is exactly what you get when you buy The Washington Post either on the news stands or especially via home delivery.
Where I live, which isn't that far from The Post's back yard and their main printing plants, if I subscribe for home delivery I'm guaranteed to get yesterday's news as the knuckleheads at The Post print up their early edition and rush me a copy of the paper. Rushed as in printed up around 10PM -- so it doesn't even include the headlines that were prominent on the 10PM news on the local FOX affiliate -- and then dropped in my yard at approximately 11PM, or perhaps as late as 1AM the next morning. The next morning being the morning that I should be seeing the paper arrive at say 4AM, with the news headlines from the national wires and the local sports scores from all of the games from the prior day.
What seems to be escaping the publishers of The Post is that if they send me a paper that just says 'late game' for every game that was played the day prior, their Sports section is basically useless. If they send me a paper that neglects to tell me that a bridge fell in Minnesota the day before when that same news was all over the headlines every where else then again the paper is useless.
The Post is lucky enough that Wall Street operates on 'banker's hours' and that the business news from the previous day is normally wrapped up nice and neatly by approximately 9pm when the earliest edition of the paper is being printed up, but outside of that news, just about everything else that they print in those early editions is incredibly stale.
I gave up home delivery of The Post years ago. Not that I care that much for their biased content, but, I would probably subscribe for at least Sunday home delivery if the paper wasn't filled with yesterday's news. I would fairly certainly subscribe for full home delivery if I could be assured of getting current Sports news in it. For the relatively small price for the daily edition, it would be worth it to me to have the paper around to read the comics, the Sports and the business news while ignoring most of the rest of it.
Unfortunately it seems that the people at The Post are more concerned with getting me a copy of their product fast, rather than timely, and that just leaves me unwilling to spend money on their product at all.
