Goodbye To All That, Newspaper Edition

After some contemplation, I’ve decided to let my daily newspaper subscription run out. I got the renewal in the mail the other day, only to discover that I’d be paying twice what I paid only a few years ago for the same measly 4 day a week deal.

I’m an old fashioned guy, and I still enjoy my weekend breakfast with a good cup of strong tea and the morning paper, but not at the price of over a buck a copy.

Practically everything I see in the paper is old news to me, items I’ve already seen online. And not just the national/international stuff, but also the local.

I can get the crossword online too, it turns out.

The TV Book is long gone. I get more coupons direct from supermarket club card datamining than I get from the manufacturers in the Sunday paper. Sports and racing results are all online, the teams I follow the closest aren’t local anyway, and I listen to far too much sports radio as it is. There isn’t much of a business section left, and Investors Daily is a better bet than a local paper anyway.

If I want to continue following the few comics left that I bother with on the comics page, they too are online.

I’d been paying for the experience of sitting down with a physical paper to do the crossword over morning tea. Well, I can print the online crossword from now on, I guess. It’s just not worth the money to pay for all the other stuff I no longer care about.

Too bad, really. Newspapers are going the way of the horse and carriage all over the country, and they only make things worse by jacking up their price, weakening their content, trashing the feature writing that attracts and keeps readership, you name it. So, pretty much decades of a regular newspaper subscription and a daily habit are going away.

Let’s wave goodbye.

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