Stop the presses...

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.
 
Sarah in SC said:
It is $44 a quarter and I read the comics, mostly.
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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.
 
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.
 
A newspaper is a kind of papery blog thing, right?
 
W2R said:
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!! :LOL:
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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!
 
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.
 
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.
 
TromboneAl said:
A newspaper is a kind of papery blog thing, right?
Click to expand...

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

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.
 
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.
 
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
 
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.
 
ERD50 said:
Similar situation for an article on composting toilets...
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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. :)
 
clifp said:
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.
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Too bad Photoshop doesn't work in real life:
 

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ERD50 said:
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.
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I think the NY Times is the only paper left where the reporters and editors know what words mean and almost always use them correctly. Too bad their understanding of economics is much less acute.

Ha
 
We have taken the Dallas Morning News for years. I really enjoy reading the paper and sipping my morning coffee each morning. The paper isn't much any more, but I still enjoy that quiet time in the mornings.

Last year the Dallas Morning News tried to pull a real sneaky on all their subscribers. They sent out a form letter thanking all their subscribers for their loyalty during such difficult times for newspapers. It looked like your typical junk mail letter that most people would not read thru but just chunk it in the trash. As a little after thought at the end of a full page letter it stated that our rates were going up like 30%. I was outraged! Not only that they would jump our rates that much in one year, but that they hid it in the small print at the bottom of a wordy form letter that 90% of their customers would never read. My DH reminded me that we pay automatically thru a credit card on file and if we didn't check our cc bill we would not have known the rate had gone up.

I called and told them to cancel our subscription that I would not be paying the new rate. The response was that they would offer me a new rate with just a 5% increase if I wouldn't cancel AND they would send me a $20 debit card. I excepted their new offer and did receive the $20 debit card. I then proceeded to contact everyone I knew and told them to pass it along that if they complained they might just get a better deal. Guess what, everyone who complained got the better deal.

We just got a notice that they are raising the rate again. We will keep getting the paper for now but I don't know how much longer we can justify paying the rates.
 
I have always heard that papers make their money on the advertising, and that then can charge more the more subscribers they have. Yet, they seem to shoot themselves in the foot by charging more for their product, then people cancel their paper, so their subscription numbers go down, and advertisers pay less.

Sounds like the airlines! I heard a past president of American Airlines say, 'It's a great industry to work in, and a horrible investment'
 
W2R said:
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.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that really bugged me when we lived in Oakland. I complained to the company numerous times.
 
clifp said:
I thought it was used for putting under cat dishes and litter boxes.:confused:

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.
Click to expand...

But then you get even bigger and uglier cell towers.
 
Printed newspapers are on the decline. Tough to make a profit.

They are struggling to find a new model that works.

The internet has not worked well for them... Too many people give it away for free.

I suspect when e-readers become more common place, we will be able to subscribe to our local papers for about half the cost of the printed and delivered paper.
 
chinaco said:
..........The internet has not worked well for them... Too many people give it away for free............
Click to expand...

Running a newspaper is like trying to be a hooker in a college town.
 
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