newspaper
Sometime last year, I gave up my daily newspaper subscription. It was piling up unread, and was adding to my sense of being always behind, and T was unhappy about the mess. (My mother has huge piles of newspapers in her apartment, and I think he’s afraid the trait is genetic.) I was suprised at how little I missed it — I still caught up on the headlines on the web, and I devoted my metro reading time to books and magazines instead.
But last month, the Post offered us one of their special deals where it only costs about $0.35 a week more to get the daily paper delivered than to get just the Sunday paper (which we had never dropped). And so I signed up, and it started last week.
From an economic point of view, it’s definitely worthwhile — there was a $4 off coupon this week from CVS that pays for the subscription for several months. From an environmental point of view, I feel guilty about the dead trees. I read a somewhat wider range of stories with the paper in front of me than I do on the web, which has its pluses and minuses.
Do you read a daily paper? Which one?
May 25th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Just the Washington Post. We read parts of it at the table over breakfast during the week, and I read the entire Saturday and Sunday editions over the weekend. We have on occasion received several-week subscriptions to WSJ for free, but when the free trial is over, we always quit. Just this morning, however, my husband suggested we start getting the weekend WSJ. I don’t know. I think reading the Post over the weekend takes up enough of my time as it is.
May 25th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
We subscribe to the NYTimes, out here on the other side of the country in Seattle. I don’t read the paper version very often; I read the NYTimes & Washington Post online. It’s true that reading online is different than reading paper. I chose my articles differently, and don’t click on some articles that I read the first few paragraphs of on paper.
bj
May 26th, 2006 at 7:14 am
Ah–the Toronto Star. Which is very relevant to you, eh? But only on Saturdays, and for similar reasons: I just don’t have time to read it during the week, and I feel awful about the dead trees. And I read several news sites online. So.
I think you’re right that it’s probably easier to be more widely informed with a paper version than an online version, but only if you actually read it, and I never did.
May 26th, 2006 at 7:27 am
WaPo, NYTimes, and WSJ – delivered to the door every morning. And – neither one of us will see fifty again. We are the nightmare of the papers, the aging customers who will die and not be replaced. Why do we do it? Well, we take paper with us on the Metro to work, we have it during lunch hour if we want it, it builds a habit in our kids of thinking the news is important. We knew our first had become ‘one of us’ when he started to read the Post’s weather report every morning before school in first grade to decide what to wear.
We had dropped the Post in favor of the Times and then started the Post again during the sniper time because we realized we were desperate for local news – hadn’t realized why Mr Jayson Blair’s articles were so, well, unsatisfying…
We also read the Thursday mailed-to-us free paper about Arlington. There is a dedicated hundred-acre-woods up in Maine making paper specifically for us.
May 26th, 2006 at 8:54 am
I used to subscribe to the Durham Herald since I lived in Chapel Hill, NC. Like you, it started piling up in our newspaper basket and I never read it. I thought after I subscribed I would read the newspaper every single day since I read so much news online, but it just didn’t happen that way. Internet news is just so much more convenient. That was a $35 discovery.
May 26th, 2006 at 8:58 am
When we lived in New York, we read the NYT. When we moved to DC, I couldn’t bear to give up the Times, so we subbed to both the Post and the Times. However, we didn’t have time to read two newspapers (frankly, I hardly had time to read the Times when we lived in New York, except when I was laid off, when I read the entire thing cover to cover every fricking day because I had nothing better to do (you can only call potential job prospects for so many hours a day)), so we cancelled the Times. We got the Post for about another year, until we decided that we needed to cut our household costs dramatically, and we cancelled the Post, too. Frankly, I felt a little guilty about it, because part of the justification for canceling it was that we read it online.
When we got to Columbus last fall, I was interested in getting a local paper, and we found that we could get the Columbus Dispatch really cheaply (less than $100 for the entire year). It’s actually a pretty good local paper. The world and national news is all wire service stories, but the local investigative reporting is really high quality. They’ve done some really good stories on fraud in the local mortgage industry, political corruption in Ohio, and so forth. But I still don’t end up reading it every day. When we go back to DC in the summer, we will probably go back to no paper.
May 26th, 2006 at 9:21 am
No, because our Sunday paper is the NYTimes and there are no daily coupons to justify the experience, common since the kids were born, of sitting down to unbag six unread newspapers in time for recylcing day. We cancelled all but the Sunday paper when the babies were about six months old (and that was when we still received the Times as a metro edition, because we lived in CT) and have resisted all their inducements to resume daily delivery.
Our local paper gets delivered free on Wednesdays and Sundays, and is a genuine paper, with real news, but that it was purchased some years back by the larger metro paper in the town next door, so in order to follow the really big stories, one has to buy the larger metro paper. We do not.
Nor, for that matter, do we ever seem to find the time or organizational skills to use coupons.
May 26th, 2006 at 10:00 am
My husband and I pour over the news on our wireless laptops at all hours. I read WashingtonPost.com, CNN.com, Drudge, RealClearPolitics, several financial sites, and 5-15 newsblogs every day. To me, it’s a waste of trees and money to subscribe to the Washington Post when the same content (plus blogs, online chats, and internet-only columns) is available for free online. I also get a better variety of information and perspectives because I read a diverse spread of online resources.
May 26th, 2006 at 10:25 am
We get the Washington Post seven days a week, and I LOVE IT. My husband would be happy to give it up (so he says), but I love sitting down with the paper at breakfast every morning. Especially on the weekends, with the Saturday Real Estate section and the Sunday special sections. If I don’t get a chance to read the paper in the morning, I find myself catching up in the evenings after Petunia has gone to bed.
May 26th, 2006 at 11:53 am
Like dave s, my husband and I get the NYT, Wash Post and WSJ daily and weekends. I also read the City Paper and the Alexandria Gazette every week, and when we lived in Arlington, I always read the Sun Weekly. We do manage to read all the papers everyday – although I mostly read the Post and the NYT and my husband reads the NYT and the WSJ. (Therefore I tend to know what is going on locally more than he.) We can’t imagine NOT reading a real newspaper . . . and we are in our mid-30’s. It’s just a matter of making time – we consider it important enough to make time for everyday, and feel really uninformed when we miss a day. We do check the websites during the day, but it isn’t the same experience at all – fine for getting updates, but not good if you really want to give a good read of what’s going on. Besides, the time it takes to read online, one could have skimmed through the paper anyway. And the paper is portable! I can read it in bed in the AM, stick a section in my purse for if I get bored, cut out articles, recipes, coupons etc . . .
I must add that my husband comes from a newspaper-career family and my dad always impressed upon his daughters how important is was to read the paper and be involved in what’s going on around us, so these habits were instilled in us early.
May 26th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
We get our local paper (Houston). I’ve considered going Sunday-only (I am a coupon queen so that’s non-negotiable), but the incremental difference for daily delivery is worth it, and my husband considers reading the comics his sacred morning ritual. Back before children, when I had disposable income and sometimes qualified for student/academic/other special rates, I loved getting the NYT, WSJ, or Financial Times. Ah, those were the days.
I’m fairly addicted to newspapers, magazines of various kinds; somehow I nearly always find time to at least skim them.
May 26th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
I am seriously addicted to the newspaper. I read our local paper, the Ottawa Citizen, every single day. I have a few news sites bookmarked, too, but there is something about the tactile satisfaction of reading the newspaper that I don’t think I’ll ever outgrow. I even love the flyers – I’m a junkie for newsprint. I read it weekdays on the bus in to work, and the boys are finally old enough that I can enjoy my favourite two or three sections of the Saturday paper at home, and I read the whole Sunday paper through the course of the day.
I used to read the Globe and Mail, too, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day anymore. And I’ll read the free commuter papers a couple of times a week on the way home from work, if I don’t have anything better on the go. I’d give up a lot of stuff before I’d give up my daily paper.
May 26th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
The office where I work takes the daily Oregonian and the NYT, and sometimes I’ll glance through them on a break or at lunch. I don’t watch television news, nor listen to radio news, I get nearly all my news online. In fact, by reading the AP feed and the NYT online, I often see articles a few days before they’re reprinted in the local paper.
May 27th, 2006 at 6:48 am
Jumping in again – there does have to be some way for (your choice) Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman, George Will, Anne Applebaum to GET PAID for his/her (your choice again) drivel, pearls of wisdom. And if everybody stops paying for the newspaper, the game is over.
A world in which everybody goes to the Internet and chooses Daily Kos or Mark Steyn or Matt Yglesias or Little Green Footballs to see what likeminded people are thinking about issues will be, well, different. Me, I like newspapers. Your mileage may differ.
May 27th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
We can’t afford the NYT out here in Oregon – well, we could, but we don’t want to – but my parents get it, so every couple of days we walk over to their house and pick up the last 3-4 issues. We’re always reading the news late, but we don’t really mind. There is more of interest on one page of a 3 day old NYT than in a whole section of the Oregonian. I get the daily news from NPR, but I grew up on the East Coast with the Times, and I love having regular access to it.
May 27th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Currently I get Newsday everyday and the NY Times on weekends. I would love to get the NY Times daily, but have no time to read it. I used to work at Newsday and part of our unwritten job description was to read the competition. They had the major papers delivered daily and it was a newspaper reader’s paradise.
May 27th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Currently I get Newsday everyday and the NY Times on weekends. I would love to get the NY Times daily, but have no time to read it. I used to work at Newsday and part of our unwritten job description was to read the competition. They had the major papers delivered daily and it was a newspaper reader’s paradise.
May 29th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
We get the local paper, mostly because the bf loves it and takes it to work to read at lunch. I also hate how it piles up so quickly, and we seem to have an inability to carry it across the parking lot to the recycling bin. I do love reading the comics at breakfast every morning, and I like the Sunday paper.
May 29th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
We just canceled the Washington Post in prep for our move up the street. Despite being a regular newspaper reader, I’m surprised how much I miss it. How it helped set the pace of the day.
I’ve been reading online (Always read the NYTimes online- too much paper and it just piles up – at that price I have to save it up and actually read them) and the online post is really not nearly as good.
May 29th, 2006 at 7:40 pm
Dave’s comment about setting an example for the kids resonated with me. It’s true, not just that I like the kids seeing us reading the paper, but that my husband and I are much more likely to discuss the news when we’re in the same room looking at an actual newspaper than if we both look at it online at different times.
Growing up, my parents always had the evening news on during dinner. I don’t want to go that route, but I do like the example of treating the news of the day as something worth talking about.
May 30th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
That’s the main reason we started subscribing to the local paper (Ann Arbor News) – did we really want the kids to grow up in a house where grown-ups don’t read the newspaper? We both read a lot online, and have subscriptions there, too (Salon and the NYTimes deluxe package, or whatever), but that somehow that doesn’t count — everything I do on the computer is described as “e-mail” by the kids.
Lots of features things from the paper don’t end up in the online version, so it really is worth it to me. The amount of paper is a bit troubling, but we do recycle so my conscience can be semi-clear.