I’ll guess that it’s changed in the intervening 7 years, and now skews more internet.
I don’t remember how I found these boards; but it certainly was through the net and not the books. I don’t think I ever heard of the books until I started reading the boards.
I started out reading the column in an NYC newspaper (What was the name of that rag?), then AOL when it became available.
I think it was called the New York Press.
Chicago Reader, mid-80’s (God, I’m old). I spotted the AOL group in 1999 but didn’t sign up till a couple years after that.
Isthmus in Madison , Wisconsin
A Google search somehow turned up a fascinating discussion on the taxonomy of sports. I went down that rabbit hole and have been hooked ever since.
Way back in the 1990s one of the local weeklies here carried the Straight Dope newspaper articles. I never read the AOL site but joined in 1999 after the board had moved.
I was looking for the San Diego Marine Bureau and about the third week in I figured out I was in the wrong place.
I remember this thread…or was it another one? Anyway, I think I found it because I’d gotten bored or read all of Listverse at the time and was searching for trivia websites on google. Spent a few weeks reading all the columns and then since I couldn’t find anything better decided to check out the message board section. Lurked a couple years, decided to join because … I forget why.
I started reading the column in the Chicago Reader in the late 80s when I moved to Evanston Illinois. (I can still remember the first time I picked one up, and thought “Free newspaper, cool !”) About ten years later I was living on the east coast, and decided to see if the Straight Dope column was online. The rest is history.
One of my kids brought home a copy of the Montreal Mirror, a local free weekly, doubtless some time in the 80s and, leafing through it, I discovered Cecil’s column. After that I looked for the Mirror every week just for Cece. Then one day, it was gone. About ten years later, it occurred to me to search the web for TSD. Bingo. Then I noticed the SDMB and I was hooked.
Got linked here from another message board in 2004 (which is still around and which I occasionally read).
That board, I found through the links page of a third site in 2001 (whose message boards are still active and which I occasionally read).
Now that site, I found through Google search, which was suggested to me by my Army superior earlier in 2001. If there’s one good thing that comes out of compulsory army service, it’s this.