Stop the presses...

[Badger]

Years ago it made a great mulch for the garden along with some grass clippings. Then the price went way up while the paper became an even worse rag for reading. About the same time I changed to a raised bed garden and hired to boy next door mow my yard. The newspaper has no value for me anymore and I refuse to pay for a paper that is 75% advertising.

Cheers!

[Walt34]

Quote:

Originally Posted by samclem ... but the real benefit is having some dedicated muck-rakers to watch the city council, zoning board, local govt, and all the other stuff I can't do personally. I pretty much just subscribe to help pay for folks to shine light on the local dealings.

Some of the same reasons here, and in addition I just like the local news, which has more of an effect on daily life than anything happening in Washington or Afghanistan. They do try very hard to do more than just muck-raking and we've gone to some interesting activities/events that we wouldn't have learned about from another source.

Before we moved to WV, I'd never been to a tractor pull....

[Dawg52]

My mother still takes the local paper. I usually drop by and pick it up for her while walking the dog in the mornings. The first thing she turns to is the obituaries. Shes 93 and has just about outlived all her friends, so not many names she recognizes anymore unless it an old friend of mind.

For me, it takes less than 5 minutes to shuffle though our paper. I see no need to subscribe to it. I can read the online version free which is good enough. As most of the older crowd dies off, so will the local papers.

[audreyh1]

We stopped the paper in 2000 shortly after we retired.

First, we noticed the entire paper was available on-line anyway. We'd already started to browse it that way.

Second, they were terrible about stopping and starting paper delivery while we were traveling, and we didn't like disclosing when we would be gone anyway.

Once we permanently stopped it - we were so glad we did! No more accumulated paper waste. Spent a lot less time too, because somehow easier to skim on on-line version.

Have never wanted a paper since. One of our neighbors seemed really surprised when we picked up their papers during a short trip and returned them all unread. No interest.

Oh - going fulltime we got rid of all print magazine subscriptions too. That was wonderful. That's another thing I don't expect to start ever again, especially since all that stuff is available on-line anyway.

Audrey

[W2R]

Quote:

Originally Posted by audreyh1 We stopped the paper in 2000 shortly after we retired. First, we noticed the entire paper was available on-line anyway. We'd already started to browse it that way. Second, they were terrible about stopping and starting paper delivery while we were traveling, and we didn't like disclosing when we would be gone anyway.

Here, you get the paper delivered on Thursdays and Sundays even if you don't subscribe. The version you get is mostly ads but it looks just like the paper. So, if you are ever away from home, whether you subscribe or not, you are advertising your absence unless you can get a neighbor to pick up your paper.

That neighbor also needs to remove the two foot long, very bright ads hung on your door knob several times per week, not to mention the oversized ads that don't fit in your mailbox and are easily visible hanging out at least a foot.

Personally, I think those behind all of the above should be prosecuted for littering but I seriously doubt that will happen in my lifetime.

And you kids, get off my lawn!!

[Sarah in SC]

W2R, looks like our country living has a few advantages--no one can make it to our door to hang anything.
I am fascinated that the Border Collie will retrieve the paper--ours are only interested in balls and frisbees.
Our paper is delivered (weekend plus Thurs) to the end of our dirt road and so we usually have to get in the car to pick it up, so sometimes we don't bother. I think we'll not renew the next time it comes up. It is $44 a quarter and I read the comics, mostly.

[Nords]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sarah in SC It is $44 a quarter and I read the comics, mostly.

Just about every comic strip I care about is online these days, eventually, as well as others that've been out of print for years. Most of them are free but even the subscriptions are far cheaper than a hardcopy paper.

[Fireup2020]

We grab a copy of the Sunday paper to peruse during our weekend diner breakfast. Coupons, funnies, and sports pages are pretty much a guilty pleasure. We leave everything but the coupons at the diner for someone else to enjoy.

[TromboneAl]

A newspaper is a kind of papery blog thing, right?

[haha]

Quote:

Originally Posted by samclem Beautiful old homes in Dayton, many now condemned. I'd like to learn someday what drove the place down.

Put crime high on your list.

Ha

[73ss454]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TromboneAl A newspaper is a kind of papery blog thing, right?

As I remember!

[fisherman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by W2R Here, you get the paper delivered on Thursdays and Sundays even if you don't subscribe. The version you get is mostly ads but it looks just like the paper. So, if you are ever away from home, whether you subscribe or not, you are advertising your absence unless you can get a neighbor to pick up your paper. That neighbor also needs to remove the two foot long, very bright ads hung on your door knob several times per week, not to mention the oversized ads that don't fit in your mailbox and are easily visible hanging out at least a foot. Personally, I think those behind all of the above should be prosecuted for littering but I seriously doubt that will happen in my lifetime. And you kids, get off my lawn!!

I have found that greeting them with a shotgun or sledge hammer is very effective at stopping their return. Just stand in the doorway with it no need to actually threaten them with it. The sign thats says solicitors will be shot works pretty good also but then again I live in Tennessee!

[Rustic23]

Sarah,
Interesting thing is we did not train the dog to do it. When he was a puppy we let him out when we would go up to get the paper. One morning he raced ahead, snapped up the paper and proudly brought it back. The training took place getting him to drop it.

He also loves his morning walks. So much so, we can sit in a chair and tell him 'shoes', he will find both mine and DW's shoes and bring them to us, and he know which ones goes to each of us.

[Sarah in SC]

Love those BC stories, Rustic. And typical for our pups to try to think "ahead" of you. I am continually amazed by their thought processes on stuff like the shoes. Since I also have the world's dumbest English setter for comparison, they seem even smarter in my house. Mine agonize over dropping the ball---they know if they do, I'll throw it again, but they can't bear letting it go.

[clifp]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TromboneAl A newspaper is a kind of papery blog thing, right?

I thought it was used for putting under cat dishes and litter boxes.

The other thing that can't disappear fast enough for me is land lines. The stupid phone company has this big ugly pole, ruining my otherwise gorgeous view of Diamondhead.

[BTravlin]

We cut back to Sundays only not long after Gannett bought out the local owners. Practically overnight it went from being a very good newspaper with a lot of investigative reporting to a mere facsimile of USA Today. We only get Sunday's paper for the coupons. We get the WSJ for real news.

[ERD50]

I think newspapers are contributing to their own decline. We get the Chicago Trib, but there is less and less of interest in there anymore, and what is of interest is so very poorly written 98% of the time. Really thinking of dropping it.

I was going to link to some examples while back, but didn't get to it (now that I think about it, I was going to start a thread and ask if anyone had Journalism degrees, and what they thought of the articles). In one paper, there were couple simple articles that I would have found mildly interesting, but the poor journalistic effort just made them worse than useless.

One was a fluff piece on the price of those 'baby carrots' (actually cut to size) versus buying big, whole carrots as God intended. I'll give them some credit for actually making an attempt to account for the time it would take you to peel and cut the big carrots, but they mixed all the units so badly, that you would need to create a spreadsheet (or at least the back of an envelope, and do some long division) to make sense of it. The info was there (number of big carrots per pound, the number of small carrots per big carrot, the time per big carrot to peel&cut, the cost of one pound of big carrots and the cost of 12 ounces of baby carrots). It would make a good middle school story problem for math class, but I just want to read the straight info - what is the journalist for?

Similar situation for an article on composting toilets and the savings in municipal water treatment costs. All the units were all over the place, local examples for one number, national examples for another. This one you couldn't even get enough info to get to a conclusion (the middle school answer should be "unsolvable, not enough information"), but the author seemed to want to tell you that composting toilets are great, because they sound 'green'. Even if you have to put an addition on your house to have enough space for one, and have someone drive (a diesel truck?) to your house to haul away the 'stuff' once a month (or whatever). Gravity and some efficient large scale pumps work pretty well for that.

-ERD50

[Bestwifeever]

They're going to put a footnote on my tombstone that I was the last subscriber--I'll never stop our subscription to our daily paper.

[REWahoo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ERD50 Similar situation for an article on composting toilets...

I'd really like to see a well-done study on this. It seems to me it would take a very long time for porcelain to decay unless you ran it through a crusher and turned it into a fine powder before throwing it on the pile.

[Walt34]

Quote:

Originally Posted by clifp The other thing that can't disappear fast enough for me is land lines. The stupid phone company has this big ugly pole, ruining my otherwise gorgeous view of Diamondhead.

Too bad Photoshop doesn't work in real life: