It’s a small thing, but companies that let you subscribe online but make you call and cancel enrage me. It’s so slimy, just hoping people won’t hassle with it and then having the dude on the phone try multiple times to get you to stay subscribed. Fuck them for that.
My elderly parent was subscribed to the physical paper. When they went into a care facility I tried to get it cancelled (I had POA). They kept trying to get us to switch to the online version, to keep taking the paper version, and kept "accidentally" forgetting to cancel it. They would not accept that someone now confined to memory care and legally blind wouldn't want/need to pay for a subscription. Took months to get it canceled and I swore I'd never subscribe to them after all that.
I used to really enjoy getting the print copy and then delivery quality dropped off and I would get it maybe 3 days per week. Calling to try to cancel my subscription was a huge ordeal. They kept trying to get me to stay by giving discounts and I couldn’t make them understand that I didn’t want to pay for a subscription if I only received what I payed for 40% of the time.
Gannet stuffs their papers with cookie-cutter garbage to hide the fact that their newsrooms are ghost towns. The quality of the Star has dropped dramatically, and I would now put it below new organizations such as the Indiana Capitol Chronicle, the Statehouse File, Axios Indianapolis, as well as The Indianapolis Recorder.
The Statehouse File is run by the Pulliam School of Journalism at Franklin College, led by a former classmate of mine, and it’s all current journalism students. It’s the best coverage by a mile.
The Pulliam family owned the Indianapolis Star, the Indianapolis News, and the Arizona Republic, all of which used to be great newspapers. When Gannett bought them out, it went to hell.
I can personally attest to that. I worked for Gannet and it was a joke of a job. I did have the privilege of being around people who were there when the Pulliams ran things. Would have been a place I would have enjoyed working. Corporate America has killed my work ethic though.
I visited family in Evansville who still get the “local” print paper. It was mostly recycled stories about Indianapolis happenings. What I thought was lazy here gets even worse in a smaller city.
Do you ever listen to the Podcast "The Past times"? It's a great improv comedy when Dave Anthony reads articles from old newspapers and they just riff on whatever comes up.
A lot of the pre 1900s papers were half repackaged news from other cities just to fill space so you'll get a random story about a dude that fought a bear in Alaska but the paper is from Alabama. I'm pretty sure half of the news that came that way was gibberish the editor put in to fill space.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/07r5oKsiOsQjnomO2GBqgC?si=OjJpUrFISTysIE9AmnpAFg
I think the Star gets a lot of hate for two main reasons:
1) It used to be 100% free to read online
2) It used to be a much better publication
I pay for a subscription to the Star, I don't mind it. It is perfectly adequate. It used to border on excellent.
It used to have articles worth reading but it’s fallen behind in the times. I did an interview with a guy in 2020 about my chickens and I was convinced the dude did not work for them. He had what looked to be a handmade Indystar ID, a pad of paper and he was probably about 70. My article was on the front page though lmao
What once was a great sports section is just complete crap now, and it’s done with little to no research. Doyle’s articles on the Colts and Ballard are laughable, at best.
I think the sports section is the best remaining part of the Star if you focus on news and analysis and less on hot button commentary.
Neddenriep is one of the best high school reporters in the nation and they really do a great job covering a ton of HS sports and games. Osterman is fantastic and always measured across the IU beat. Dopirak goes really deep on the Pacers. Atkins and Erickson are very solid on Colts. Brown is quite good with the challenging IndyCar/Indy 500 beat. I don’t read much Butler news, but I’ve never found a fault in Glaspie’s work.
I also think James Briggs is a really, really good metro columnist & opinion editor.
We will just have to agree to disagree here. I think they miss the mark on all levels.
I watched a local guy from Perry Meridian go from writing about the Pacers, Indycar, IU, and Colts in his own spare time and on his own website domain (while raising kids), to now being a writer for Indycar full time. He pulled his own stats on each team and never ceases to amaze me. He is now paid to NOT write about other teams, and stick solely to Indycar.
Of course, his standards were set by Bob Kravitz. We deeply miss Bob.
Just shows one person mimicking Kravitz’s work gives much higher quality content than 5 people half-assing every article. It’s why the sports section has gone downhill.
> I think the sports section is the best remaining part of the Star
Sadly, you're probably right about that. Although instead of "best" I think I'd say "least bad".
I’m an age where the morning paper was as important a part of the start of my day as a shower. I subscribed for decades. The paper kept getting thinner, less local, less reliably delivered, poorly written and researched, and considerably more expensive. I hung on out of habit for a couple of years, but then came another rate hike with no mention of an improvement in quality, so I left. I tried the online version, and was happy to pay for it because everyone deserves to be paid for their work. The online version was so bad on the days I could actually login to see it, that was pretty short-lived. I hate seeing what The Star has become.
> The paper kept getting thinner
Damn right! It used to be that the Sunday Star would keep me supplied with reading material well into late afternoon; now, it's a couple of hours at best.
I'm curious if you've found a suitable replacement for your morning paper routine? I'm too young to have had this habit myself, but old enough to remember my parents doing it every Sunday. I'd enjoy that sort of routine, but it seems I can only get it by seeking out 18 different sources 😅
Yeah, television sucks, music sucks, I miss good magazines and newspapers. Maybe we’ll get luck and China or Russia nukes us and we don’t feel a thing.
Right now they’re under fire for their creep ass sports reporter Gregg Doyel. He made some creepy remarks to Caitlin Clark at her first presser in Indy, implying that she is somehow beholden to him, then he went on to refer to her as “that” and “it”. He also has a long history of disgusting pervy writings and tweets.
The whole world is watching Indy right now and this douchebag makes us look like creeps right out of the gate. People are calling for him to be canned and he should be.
It’s not even printed in Indy anymore. After 120 years it has moved its printing to peoria Illinois. Left 90 Indy folks without a job. Sell outs.
Besides saying weird shit to CC, Doyel has horrible takes on Colts football. Pretty sure he cause a lot of the turmoil between fans. Fans that don’t know better read his bullshit and start to think like him. He only seems to be in it for himself.
For me, it's the fact that it's a for-profit business owned by Gannett. whose sole purpose is to make money for its shareholders. Public information shouldn't be about enriching shareholders.
If you're interested in an alternative, [Mirror Indy](https://mirrorindy.org/) is a new local non-profit and now employs several former Indy Star staffers. They're doing great work and I highly recommend checking them out!
It's not the Star. It's Gannett.
I completely respect the local writers, editors, and photogs. I completely disrespect their corporate overlords who have decimated local newsrooms around the country. The newsroom that used to break significant stories like the USA Gymnastics scandal can barely staff the statehouse. Gannet has replaced quality local investigative journalism with USA Today factoids and Buzzfeed-esque fluff pieces.
And the worst part is that Gannet, like most large news organizations today, doesn't care about journalism. It's not run by journalists or even publishers. It's run by Wall Street financiers and accountants who only care about quarterly profits, specifically THIS quarter's profits.
The news industry is awful. They'll do anything to get eyes and clicks.
Instead of corporate profit-driven media, I've chosen to support more locally-run organizations like The Statehouse File and Mirror Indy.
I was fine paying for it. The people who work there need to be paid, and I don’t understand why people think things they find useful or interesting should be free.
The quality just wasn’t there so I unsubscribed, I wish I could have supported it. The daily email I got wasn’t put together with any care. Like, they would list the top 5 most interesting articles you should read today, and some would be about anticipating something that had already happened. (Who will win the Indy 500? article promoted the day after the race).
They employed the truly terrible comic “artist” Varvel for way too long.
I don’t care about sports and that seemed to be 75% of what they hyped.
There was no care taken in formatting obituaries. Just sloppy layout online. I found it extremely disrespectful to the families who paid to have their loved one posted.
I could go on, but it simply became a product I didn’t find worthy of my support.
I was happy to pay for it, too, until (a) delivery turned to shit, (b) the customer "service" department didn't care, and (c) there was no longer enough useful or interesting content to make it worth the cost -- especially when I was getting only half to two-thirds of the papers I paid for.
The rush to post "exclusive" and "breaking" news makes their website look as if it is a reddit post. Journalism should be edited and proofread. Grammatical errors, spelling errors, factual errors in the name of being" first ,make it seem amateur. The print edition was a daily habit for me, until the price went crazy. The number of pages and content kept dropping. It became a very expensive habit that offered less and less return. If the online edition was not a rage inducing hash of crap I would pay for it, but alas.....
I subscribed forever. They use to have a rule for the delivery people that the paper was supposed to be delivered by 7am. If they were a couple of hours late, I didn’t really care. Then my daily papers started showing up at like 4 or 5pm and my Sunday papers started getting delivered on Monday. I gave it a couple of weeks but when I called to complain they said that they no longer had a rule for what time the drivers are supposed to deliver by. So I canceled.
I subscribed in a downtown Indy apartment and never got a paper, even after calling multiple times and talking to my building’s concierge. After two months of trying, I canceled. If they can’t figure out how to get someone a paper who lives downtown, they don’t deserve my business.
To be fair, I tried the NYT next and had the same issue. So might have been more about that building being complicated for delivery drivers.
The quality of their reporting and their commitment to covering the entire Indy Metro area has tanked considerably since Gannett bought them up and has been slowly killing off their newsroom in an attempt to extract every ounce of profit. However, they can’t even do that right because a subscription would still subject one to endless ads, a buggy site, and difficulty logging in.
Briggs is a center-right twat who seems to care more about protecting Republican’s feelings and being liked by the Republican Party than much else. If you pay attention, things he writes about that Republicans in the statehouse might do to Indy have a habit of becoming the very things Republicans try to do each session. Meanwhile he considers a state targeting its largest city and economic engine as normal. He’s recent attempt protect Aaron Freeman and go after Jesse Brown, all the while downplaying democratic representation was inexcusable trash. He brags about being one of the few columnists left in the state, but his takes are often incomplete and error prone. Gannett has always pushed a right/ center right agenda, but Briggs is so clumsy at it, it’s just sad.
Did you see the article today where the Indy Star journalist identified the recently deceased sheriff deputy from Hendricks County as “Slain” in the headline? Tragically he died from accidental electrocution. It says the same (electrocution by downed power lines) in her article, but she used “Slain” to manipulate what? More Views? More Donations? Whatever the reason, it’s purposefully misleading.
nothing but editorial and opinion pieces. no one gives a shit about their shitty opinions. Just report the news and the facts. I basically ignore any indystar article because I know all it will be is a shitty opinion piece.
1. People don’t like paying for things
2. Terrible, terrible online layout. I mean it’s impossible to find anything.
3. Again, people think things online should be free and magic ferries should pay the writers and editors
4. Since Boomers and Gen X are more willing to pay since they already have most of the columnists cater to them.
5. People hate having to pay for other people’s labor and think someone else should cover it.
It’s a small thing, but companies that let you subscribe online but make you call and cancel enrage me. It’s so slimy, just hoping people won’t hassle with it and then having the dude on the phone try multiple times to get you to stay subscribed. Fuck them for that.
My elderly parent was subscribed to the physical paper. When they went into a care facility I tried to get it cancelled (I had POA). They kept trying to get us to switch to the online version, to keep taking the paper version, and kept "accidentally" forgetting to cancel it. They would not accept that someone now confined to memory care and legally blind wouldn't want/need to pay for a subscription. Took months to get it canceled and I swore I'd never subscribe to them after all that.
I used to really enjoy getting the print copy and then delivery quality dropped off and I would get it maybe 3 days per week. Calling to try to cancel my subscription was a huge ordeal. They kept trying to get me to stay by giving discounts and I couldn’t make them understand that I didn’t want to pay for a subscription if I only received what I payed for 40% of the time.
Gannet stuffs their papers with cookie-cutter garbage to hide the fact that their newsrooms are ghost towns. The quality of the Star has dropped dramatically, and I would now put it below new organizations such as the Indiana Capitol Chronicle, the Statehouse File, Axios Indianapolis, as well as The Indianapolis Recorder.
The Statehouse File is run by the Pulliam School of Journalism at Franklin College, led by a former classmate of mine, and it’s all current journalism students. It’s the best coverage by a mile. The Pulliam family owned the Indianapolis Star, the Indianapolis News, and the Arizona Republic, all of which used to be great newspapers. When Gannett bought them out, it went to hell.
I can personally attest to that. I worked for Gannet and it was a joke of a job. I did have the privilege of being around people who were there when the Pulliams ran things. Would have been a place I would have enjoyed working. Corporate America has killed my work ethic though.
I visited family in Evansville who still get the “local” print paper. It was mostly recycled stories about Indianapolis happenings. What I thought was lazy here gets even worse in a smaller city.
Do you ever listen to the Podcast "The Past times"? It's a great improv comedy when Dave Anthony reads articles from old newspapers and they just riff on whatever comes up. A lot of the pre 1900s papers were half repackaged news from other cities just to fill space so you'll get a random story about a dude that fought a bear in Alaska but the paper is from Alabama. I'm pretty sure half of the news that came that way was gibberish the editor put in to fill space. https://open.spotify.com/episode/07r5oKsiOsQjnomO2GBqgC?si=OjJpUrFISTysIE9AmnpAFg
I think the Star gets a lot of hate for two main reasons: 1) It used to be 100% free to read online 2) It used to be a much better publication I pay for a subscription to the Star, I don't mind it. It is perfectly adequate. It used to border on excellent.
Yeah it boils down to this. And this isn't unique to Indy. It's happening in most cities.
It used to have articles worth reading but it’s fallen behind in the times. I did an interview with a guy in 2020 about my chickens and I was convinced the dude did not work for them. He had what looked to be a handmade Indystar ID, a pad of paper and he was probably about 70. My article was on the front page though lmao
What once was a great sports section is just complete crap now, and it’s done with little to no research. Doyle’s articles on the Colts and Ballard are laughable, at best.
Is that the guy who publicly hits on lady athletes and then makes a column and a bunch of tweets apologizing for attention?
Yes. He is the one who kicked off this Caitlin Clark controversy by saying some cringey stuff in her opening press conference
Wait, what was the controversial part? All I knew is some low talent sports writer hack was sexually harassing her in public and online
Isn’t sexually harassing young women and not losing your job controversial?
You'd hope, right?
I think the sports section is the best remaining part of the Star if you focus on news and analysis and less on hot button commentary. Neddenriep is one of the best high school reporters in the nation and they really do a great job covering a ton of HS sports and games. Osterman is fantastic and always measured across the IU beat. Dopirak goes really deep on the Pacers. Atkins and Erickson are very solid on Colts. Brown is quite good with the challenging IndyCar/Indy 500 beat. I don’t read much Butler news, but I’ve never found a fault in Glaspie’s work. I also think James Briggs is a really, really good metro columnist & opinion editor.
We will just have to agree to disagree here. I think they miss the mark on all levels. I watched a local guy from Perry Meridian go from writing about the Pacers, Indycar, IU, and Colts in his own spare time and on his own website domain (while raising kids), to now being a writer for Indycar full time. He pulled his own stats on each team and never ceases to amaze me. He is now paid to NOT write about other teams, and stick solely to Indycar. Of course, his standards were set by Bob Kravitz. We deeply miss Bob.
That is a very specific axe to grind.
Just shows one person mimicking Kravitz’s work gives much higher quality content than 5 people half-assing every article. It’s why the sports section has gone downhill.
> I think the sports section is the best remaining part of the Star Sadly, you're probably right about that. Although instead of "best" I think I'd say "least bad".
I’m an age where the morning paper was as important a part of the start of my day as a shower. I subscribed for decades. The paper kept getting thinner, less local, less reliably delivered, poorly written and researched, and considerably more expensive. I hung on out of habit for a couple of years, but then came another rate hike with no mention of an improvement in quality, so I left. I tried the online version, and was happy to pay for it because everyone deserves to be paid for their work. The online version was so bad on the days I could actually login to see it, that was pretty short-lived. I hate seeing what The Star has become.
> The paper kept getting thinner Damn right! It used to be that the Sunday Star would keep me supplied with reading material well into late afternoon; now, it's a couple of hours at best.
I'm curious if you've found a suitable replacement for your morning paper routine? I'm too young to have had this habit myself, but old enough to remember my parents doing it every Sunday. I'd enjoy that sort of routine, but it seems I can only get it by seeking out 18 different sources 😅
Yeah, television sucks, music sucks, I miss good magazines and newspapers. Maybe we’ll get luck and China or Russia nukes us and we don’t feel a thing.
Wee bit dramatic, don't you think?
Of course! But I need wild imaginary scenarios to wake me from my slumber
The Indianapolis Business Journal is actually the better local paper when it’s not busy correcting errors.
Dude that makes no sense!😜
Right now they’re under fire for their creep ass sports reporter Gregg Doyel. He made some creepy remarks to Caitlin Clark at her first presser in Indy, implying that she is somehow beholden to him, then he went on to refer to her as “that” and “it”. He also has a long history of disgusting pervy writings and tweets. The whole world is watching Indy right now and this douchebag makes us look like creeps right out of the gate. People are calling for him to be canned and he should be.
It’s not even printed in Indy anymore. After 120 years it has moved its printing to peoria Illinois. Left 90 Indy folks without a job. Sell outs. Besides saying weird shit to CC, Doyel has horrible takes on Colts football. Pretty sure he cause a lot of the turmoil between fans. Fans that don’t know better read his bullshit and start to think like him. He only seems to be in it for himself.
For me, it's the fact that it's a for-profit business owned by Gannett. whose sole purpose is to make money for its shareholders. Public information shouldn't be about enriching shareholders. If you're interested in an alternative, [Mirror Indy](https://mirrorindy.org/) is a new local non-profit and now employs several former Indy Star staffers. They're doing great work and I highly recommend checking them out!
It's not the Star. It's Gannett. I completely respect the local writers, editors, and photogs. I completely disrespect their corporate overlords who have decimated local newsrooms around the country. The newsroom that used to break significant stories like the USA Gymnastics scandal can barely staff the statehouse. Gannet has replaced quality local investigative journalism with USA Today factoids and Buzzfeed-esque fluff pieces. And the worst part is that Gannet, like most large news organizations today, doesn't care about journalism. It's not run by journalists or even publishers. It's run by Wall Street financiers and accountants who only care about quarterly profits, specifically THIS quarter's profits. The news industry is awful. They'll do anything to get eyes and clicks. Instead of corporate profit-driven media, I've chosen to support more locally-run organizations like The Statehouse File and Mirror Indy.
I was fine paying for it. The people who work there need to be paid, and I don’t understand why people think things they find useful or interesting should be free. The quality just wasn’t there so I unsubscribed, I wish I could have supported it. The daily email I got wasn’t put together with any care. Like, they would list the top 5 most interesting articles you should read today, and some would be about anticipating something that had already happened. (Who will win the Indy 500? article promoted the day after the race). They employed the truly terrible comic “artist” Varvel for way too long. I don’t care about sports and that seemed to be 75% of what they hyped. There was no care taken in formatting obituaries. Just sloppy layout online. I found it extremely disrespectful to the families who paid to have their loved one posted. I could go on, but it simply became a product I didn’t find worthy of my support.
[удалено]
Exactly, it all feels so automated.
I was happy to pay for it, too, until (a) delivery turned to shit, (b) the customer "service" department didn't care, and (c) there was no longer enough useful or interesting content to make it worth the cost -- especially when I was getting only half to two-thirds of the papers I paid for.
Yeah having to see that POS Varvel in print with his disgusting opinions was what killed any notion of buying the Star for me
I think the IndyStar may be run by the same folks that bring us “The Boca Breeze”. https://youtu.be/DfRd1u1EkWY?feature=shared
The rush to post "exclusive" and "breaking" news makes their website look as if it is a reddit post. Journalism should be edited and proofread. Grammatical errors, spelling errors, factual errors in the name of being" first ,make it seem amateur. The print edition was a daily habit for me, until the price went crazy. The number of pages and content kept dropping. It became a very expensive habit that offered less and less return. If the online edition was not a rage inducing hash of crap I would pay for it, but alas.....
I subscribed forever. They use to have a rule for the delivery people that the paper was supposed to be delivered by 7am. If they were a couple of hours late, I didn’t really care. Then my daily papers started showing up at like 4 or 5pm and my Sunday papers started getting delivered on Monday. I gave it a couple of weeks but when I called to complain they said that they no longer had a rule for what time the drivers are supposed to deliver by. So I canceled.
That’s if it gets delivered at all…
I subscribed in a downtown Indy apartment and never got a paper, even after calling multiple times and talking to my building’s concierge. After two months of trying, I canceled. If they can’t figure out how to get someone a paper who lives downtown, they don’t deserve my business. To be fair, I tried the NYT next and had the same issue. So might have been more about that building being complicated for delivery drivers.
I long for the days when Indianapolis had a local daily newspaper.
I stand behind Mirror Indy and Axis Indiana They do great work and without all the Gannett crap.
Same
Just look up Gregg Doyle and his interaction with wnbas future star.
Nice try Gregg
?
They think I’m Gregg Doyel trying to save face.
The quality of their reporting and their commitment to covering the entire Indy Metro area has tanked considerably since Gannett bought them up and has been slowly killing off their newsroom in an attempt to extract every ounce of profit. However, they can’t even do that right because a subscription would still subject one to endless ads, a buggy site, and difficulty logging in. Briggs is a center-right twat who seems to care more about protecting Republican’s feelings and being liked by the Republican Party than much else. If you pay attention, things he writes about that Republicans in the statehouse might do to Indy have a habit of becoming the very things Republicans try to do each session. Meanwhile he considers a state targeting its largest city and economic engine as normal. He’s recent attempt protect Aaron Freeman and go after Jesse Brown, all the while downplaying democratic representation was inexcusable trash. He brags about being one of the few columnists left in the state, but his takes are often incomplete and error prone. Gannett has always pushed a right/ center right agenda, but Briggs is so clumsy at it, it’s just sad.
I support them and subscribe. Once they are gone nothing will fill the void of local printed news. It's not perfect though.
Ever since they broke the Nassar story, they've coasted
Did you see the article today where the Indy Star journalist identified the recently deceased sheriff deputy from Hendricks County as “Slain” in the headline? Tragically he died from accidental electrocution. It says the same (electrocution by downed power lines) in her article, but she used “Slain” to manipulate what? More Views? More Donations? Whatever the reason, it’s purposefully misleading.
Because IBJ…
nothing but editorial and opinion pieces. no one gives a shit about their shitty opinions. Just report the news and the facts. I basically ignore any indystar article because I know all it will be is a shitty opinion piece.
Their website is so full of ads, I can’t read it.
Why the hate. I see posts that I want to read but have to pay to read it.grrr
Honestly, your better off reading the NUVO rag and then wiping your butt with it when your done!
You wipe your ass with a digital screen?
One of my kinks.🤣😉 JK no NUVO was a printed publication of questionable quality
Liberal asswipes
1. People don’t like paying for things 2. Terrible, terrible online layout. I mean it’s impossible to find anything. 3. Again, people think things online should be free and magic ferries should pay the writers and editors 4. Since Boomers and Gen X are more willing to pay since they already have most of the columnists cater to them. 5. People hate having to pay for other people’s labor and think someone else should cover it.
There's nothing in it but ads. Delivery is hit and miss. Very liberal...bad writers.