I feel guilty. I subscribe to the Kindle Failing New York Times, but I think I ought to support my local paper too.
I’ve never had a newspaper subscription and can’t remember the last time I bought or even read the paper version of one.
It’s cute that you think that call center is in USA.
I haven’t picked up a Sunday edition in awhile, but the weekday editions are a shell of themselves, so I assume the Sunday edition is also much slimmer than it used to be.
Back in the early 90s, a Sunday paper was something like a buck fifty around here. I’d be willing to pay $5 today for a Sunday paper if it was the same size as I remember them being back then.
That said, I always thought newspapers were a good deal. Most of their revenue wasn’t from subscriptions, anyway, but ad sales, so the price of the paper was somewhat subsidized in that way. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, papers were a quarter or 35 cents during the week. You got quite a lot, I thought, for that kind of money.
I actually did have a paper subscription to the Sun-Times up until about ten or so years ago, when they fired all their staff photographers. When that happened, that was the end of my subscription. To be honest, as much as I did enjoy papers and their physicality, they produced a lot of garbage and seemed wasteful to me, given other (electronic) methods of media dissemination these days. That said, I do have the papers from when the Cubs won the world series a few years ago, and that’s much more meaningful to me than saving a webpage.
My Gatehouse Media rag charges $9 to send you a paper invoice. They also subtract $5 to $9.95 from the amount paid for a subscription for every special supplement they include, thereby shortening the period for which you’ve already paid! They do have a Buzz column to which you can email anonymously a “Buzz” (comments) of up to 30 words per day. Today was two full-page-height columns.
Gatehouse Media is a circular firing squad. A quick glance at the local bird cage liner’s electronic front page shows the same story 5 times, and most anything else at least 3 times. I suspect they are only hiring those who flunked out of journalism classes at the local community college.
Nope. Virginia. I checked plus the accents of the people are definitely from that region.
The really nice trick about all this is that they handle all customer contacts. Phone, email, US mail. So if you want to complain about their lousy customer service, guess where it ends up?
Customer Service is another reason we dropped the paper. It used to be that if you didn’t get a paper, or it was soaking wet on a rainy day, you could call the circulation dept and someone would actually answer the phone, and you’d have your paper within the hour. Now it’s all voice response (with fake keyboard clacking while it says stuff like “Let me look up that account”) and then there is a 50% chance that you get a replacement paper delivered the next day with your regular paper.
And then there was the time a year and a half ago, when we were out of town for three days while mom was in the hospital, and our carrier somehow decided that since nobody was picking up the papers, he would just have our subscription cancelled. Nobody at the paper could ever explain to me why the carrier was allowed to make that decision in the first place and why nobody bothered to check with us to confirm it. I basically had to set up a whole new account just to get the paper started again.
They leave the Sunday paper on my driveway, even though I have never subscribed and have called them twice to say that I don’t want the darn thing.
Last winter they left it on the driveway, instead of the magazine box under my mail box LIKE THEY’RE FUCKING SUPPOSED TO and it snowed during the night and I didn’t see it and ran over it with my snowblower and it broke the drive belt.
I don’t want the dang newspaper in the first place, in the second place I don’t want stuff dropped on my driveway, and in the third place I don’t want the dang newspaper in the first place.
pant pant
On some level I want them to call me up and offer me a subscription for the low low price of STOP LEAVING THAT THING ON MY DRIVEWAY DAMMIT. Which injunction they will ignore.
Regards,
Shodan
I have gotten a paper newspaper since 1979. I still subscribe to the Washington Post (since 1983). I do read a lot of news online.
I recently looked at my bill and got sticker shock. A subscription to the Post includes full online access, so I called and asked what my bill would be if I dropped the paper and just kept the online part. They never answered the question but offered to knock 60% off my subscription rate. The print versions depend on ad revenue so they do whatever they can to keep circulation up, even if it means cutting subscription rates.
So I still get paper in my driveway every morning. I just like reading the paper over breakfast.
The downside to print media is that you read what they think is important for you to read. With the Post or the Times, you know are getting confirmed facts although they have a liberal leaning and the Post has a clear bias against Trump in the way that they word things and the prominence they give to certain articles. However, given Trump’s attack on the press I think they have remarkable restraint, and they do publish right-wing editorials frequently (George Will, Marc Thiessen, and other guest editorialists) so it is much more balanced than, say, Fox News.
And another jerk thing the paper does: Used to be if you suspended the paper while you were away they’d extend the subscription by that amount. Not anymore. I guess they think you’re reading it online while you’re away. (No, I read the local paper/USA Today or whatever.)
They don’t deliver it to my driveway, so it doesn’t count. 
The Times still does. The Mercury News, not so much. We canceled our daily subscription when they pulled that stunt.
We got our really local paper before moving to the Mercury News, but we stopped that when they decided to not have a print paper on Monday, you can read it on line. Screw that.
well usually our local paper except for the sports and comics were cat box liner except fr one incident
see my aunt puts up Xmas decorations thay were known locally for …well she stated running them on an outdoor gas generator … well my disabled nephew had just gotten out of the hospital/hospice after a year and was all excited to see the lights the second night they were on …someone stole the generator out of the yard
I called the paper and they printed a story on it and found one new in the box sitting on our door step (it cost 800 dollars… i did some checking on it )and we had people wanting to drop off brand new ones they were gonna buy… we thanked everyone via the paper …and it was my nephews last xmas tho
Good point, but I’m pretty sure the paper cost a lot less than 57c, even on Sunday.
I know some editors at the Gazette who would be surprised to learn you think they live in Toronto.
The layout is centralized, not the editing.
Not that Postmedia is all that great – it went downhill when it got taken over by an American hedge fund. How any Canadian government allowed that is beyond me.
My local town has a daily paper that is now Monday through Thursday and a Saturday edition. They just got bought out by a regional publisher, raised the price, and made it even skinnier (and dropped Doonesbury in the transition and replaced it with Mary Worth). It’s next thing we’ll be cutting when we do a budget.
I also get the Minneapolis Sunday paper, which actually contains lots of the same articles, especially in the travel and business sections. I’m more willing to keep it, even at $4 a week for the print edition, delivered. The Sunday morning ritual of reading the paper is very relaxing to me. It’s such a routine to me that I have to read the sections in a particular order, ending with the travel section and then the comics.
Back then the paper was mostly paid for by advertising. Craigslist and Facebook torpedoed the classifieds, businesses realized the eyeballs were looking elsewhere, but the people producing the newspaper still would like very much to be paid for their work.
I expect printed newspapers will be almost gone in another decade.