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Newspaper subscriptions (1 Viewer)

Paperboy

  • yes - for physical delivery to my house/office

    Votes: 15 20.8%
  • yes - for a digital copy

    Votes: 12 16.7%
  • no

    Votes: 45 62.5%

  • Total voters
    72

mr. furley

Footballguy
my efforts to keep up with the local news have been stymied by the newspaper website's paywall. 

i'd like to read a couple sports articles and a couple local interest articles a day ( @Henry Ford ) but don't want to pay their asking price. largely because the other articles included in the paper are basically summary of much longer, more detailed and better written articles that i can get elsewhere.  essentially they take the USA Today summary of a story, summarize that and then edit it down to a couple vague paragraphs that aren't of much use.

therefore i do not subscribe to the local paper. i did for years but the number & quality of the articles have declined precipitously along with a significant increase in the amount of ads.

yes, i understand that subscription numbers decreasing means decreasing newspaper quality. yes, i understand that this isn't much different than the move from wax, to cassette, to cd, to digital excepting for the relative content quality not decreasing as has happened with newspapers.

 
my efforts to keep up with the local news have been stymied by the newspaper website's paywall. 

i'd like to read a couple sports articles and a couple local interest articles a day ( @Henry Ford ) but don't want to pay their asking price. largely because the other articles included in the paper are basically summary of much longer, more detailed and better written articles that i can get elsewhere.  essentially they take the USA Today summary of a story, summarize that and then edit it down to a couple vague paragraphs that aren't of much use.

therefore i do not subscribe to the local paper. i did for years but the number & quality of the articles have declined precipitously along with a significant increase in the amount of ads.

yes, i understand that subscription numbers decreasing means decreasing newspaper quality. yes, i understand that this isn't much different than the move from wax, to cassette, to cd, to digital excepting for the relative content quality not decreasing as has happened with newspapers.
I miss my daily wall street journal soooo much..But I don't want to pay for a subscription.  My local paper is a worthless rag on weekdays, barely anything there anymore and Sundays are just MEH.  But I loved my WSJ

 
I get a physical copy of the paper every day. Have been for years.

I can sit down every morning and sometimes in the evening and read some news without pop-up ads, distractions, videos playing, etc....

The digital copy of our local paper (and really all the news stations now), have so many damn ads popping up every time you scroll, or some banner ad pops up, or some video that has nothing to do with the story I'm trying to read....its maddening. And I don't see how people can even read their content that way every day. Would drive me insane.

 
I like a physical paper and have been getting one delivered to the house for years.

However, I get 90% of my news online. Maybe half the time, our physical paper goes completely unread. The other half of the time, I read the op-eds, some sports, and some local-interest articles. Wednesdays are for the local grocery ads, Sundays for most other adverts/coupons.

I appreciate the nostalgia value ... but the truth is that our paper newspaper doesn't have the same role in our lives as it did for our parents and grandparents. I used to look through the newspaper (and not just at comics) starting around 5 or 6 years old. My kids (13 and 16) never really look at the paper paper for anything except the occasional ad insert.

It's kinda sad, but what are you gonna do?

 
The staff that's left at our local papers are stretched micro thin and primarily publish poorly edited articles that align with their corporate overloads priorities. I get better info online then mixing in dialogue with my various circles that are actually connected with what's going on.

 
Physical NY Times on Sunday, which includes full digital subscription.  Best of all worlds.

having too many physical papers turns me into a hoarder because i refuse to get rid of them until i've at least skimmed through.

Last weekend, I read a great article from June about the newly-elected, progressive female president of Slovakia.  I had no idea!

 
I appreciate the nostalgia value ... but the truth is that our paper newspaper doesn't have the same role in our lives as it did for our parents and grandparents. I used to look through the newspaper (and not just at comics) starting around 5 or 6 years old. My kids (13 and 16) never really look at the paper paper for anything except the occasional ad insert.

It's kinda sad, but what are you gonna do?
growing up living with my grandparents, walking down the stairs to the smell of coffee & eggs while my grandpa read his paper in the kitchen is burned in to my brain permanently. i grew up reading the paper and probably did every day until about... 10 years ago? 

delivered the paper from about 10 - 16 & even worked at the distribution center for a while.  the newspaper was a big part of my life.  losing that tactile association with the ink, the smell, the rustle of the paper has been a bummer but i just can't justify paying for a newspaper that's a total of 12 pages between sports, local, national and business pages.  most of which is just summarized stories cribbed from other papers and the rest is ads.

it sucks

piecing together news from various sources would be way too costly.

 
No newspapers for me anymore. Did deliver when I was a kid (60s). Was a great way for a kid to earn some money. When my mom was living in the in-law apartment at my house. I would stop in after work and we would do the word jumble together and compare obituary listings for our respective age groups (weird, I know).

 
My local paper was bought by Gannett a couple years ago and went straight into a crap-hole.  But we still get it every day.  For whatever reason, my wife loves to see the kids reading the comics and doing the crossword on the physical newspaper in the mornings before school.  The worst thing about Gannett is they way they bill me. Some months my bill is in the high $40s.  I'll call once in a while when I have the time, and they always apologize and say they're going to credit me or knock it back down, they it goes right back up a gain a couple months later.  Speaking with some neighbors a couple weeks ago, we learned we all pay dramatically different amounts for the same subscription to the same paper.  The people with the time and energy to call every few weeks are the ones paying the least, us lazy guys are all paying $45/mo for it. 

I saw today that shareholders approved the merger of Gannett and New Media/Gatehouse.  Things will go from bad to worse.

 
  The worst thing about Gannett is they way they bill me. Some months my bill is in the high $40s.  I'll call once in a while when I have the time, and they always apologize and say they're going to credit me or knock it back down, they it goes right back up a gain a couple months later.  Speaking with some neighbors a couple weeks ago, we learned we all pay dramatically different amounts for the same subscription to the same paper.  The people with the time and energy to call every few weeks are the ones paying the least, us lazy guys are all paying $45/mo for it. 
we're a Gannett paper town, too

my billing was also always jacked up. not $40+/month but i was regularly billed for a different package than i had signed up for. or not billed, then they'd catch up and that would be wrong :no:

seems like billing would be a fundamental that a business wouldn't want to screw up but...

 
Seven days a week subscription to the Washington Post.  Have more time to read on the weekends, but I'll bring it in to work and flip through during lunch break, or read at home at night.  Comes with digital subscription too.

 
I miss my daily wall street journal soooo much..But I don't want to pay for a subscription.  My local paper is a worthless rag on weekdays, barely anything there anymore and Sundays are just MEH.  But I loved my WSJ
My work provides a free online subscription to the WSJ, I look at the headlines almost daily and read a few articles a week.  With that and an internal daily news synopsis email with banking articles from my geographic area I don't really miss the newspaper. 

I do occasionally visit the local newspaper site for a sports article or local interest article, but I find out about it in other ways first.  I never visit the site just to see what is in the paper.  

 
My work provides a free online subscription to the WSJ, I look at the headlines almost daily and read a few articles a week.  With that and an internal daily news synopsis email with banking articles from my geographic area I don't really miss the newspaper. 

I do occasionally visit the local newspaper site for a sports article or local interest article, but I find out about it in other ways first.  I never visit the site just to see what is in the paper.  
Wish mine did..I miss my WSJ

 
My local paper was bought by Gannett a couple years ago and went straight into a crap-hole.  But we still get it every day.  For whatever reason, my wife loves to see the kids reading the comics and doing the crossword on the physical newspaper in the mornings before school.  The worst thing about Gannett is they way they bill me. Some months my bill is in the high $40s.  I'll call once in a while when I have the time, and they always apologize and say they're going to credit me or knock it back down, they it goes right back up a gain a couple months later.  Speaking with some neighbors a couple weeks ago, we learned we all pay dramatically different amounts for the same subscription to the same paper.  The people with the time and energy to call every few weeks are the ones paying the least, us lazy guys are all paying $45/mo for it. 

I saw today that shareholders approved the merger of Gannett and New Media/Gatehouse.  Things will go from bad to worse.


we're a Gannett paper town, too

my billing was also always jacked up. not $40+/month but i was regularly billed for a different package than i had signed up for. or not billed, then they'd catch up and that would be wrong :no:

seems like billing would be a fundamental that a business wouldn't want to screw up but...
Gannett here too.  I switched to a plan that did not include Monday & Tuesday - saved over 50%. Then, I got an offer to go back to a full week for less than the original price. I'm still riding it, but I expect a surprise at any moment. I'll be on the phone as soon as it happens. Frustrating.

 
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They are hoping people autopay and don't pay attention.  See Cable companies, AT&T, etc., etc.
Exactly true.  And it works with me, because I don't have the diligence to keep up with them.  I called a year or so ago when I saw a spike in my monthly bill.  They told me it was for a special holiday insert they had at Thanksgiving.  After a few questions, I'm pretty sure they billed me some odd amount like $7.78, basically for all the black Friday ads and a couple garbage Gannett national stories about thanksgiving. No joke.  They told me I had received a postcard earlier in the summer that told me I had to notify them if I did NOT want to be billed extra for those special sections.  I told them to #### off and cancel my subscription, at which point they agreed to credit it to my account.  I'm almost certain that never happened, and that they've continued billing me extra for this stuff ever since.

 
I am a news junkie. I have 3 subscriptions (NYT, Washington Post, and Boston Globe) I live outside of DC, and grew up near Boston, so I keep on on 'home' events thru the Globe.

For the Post, I have, similar to some others here, a physical Sunday subscription that reduces the digital cost that I never read.

Back in the 80s, my brother and I had a newspaper route in our neighborhood (~30 homes), we would alternate months for Monday thru Saturday and share Sunday. It was a great money maker. I loved December, when our 'clients' would give us a nice annual tip.

Used to have a job in college that we had to scan thru at least a half-dozen papers to gather articles related to the international work we were doing. Huge waste of paper!! Not something that is done anymore! 

 
You guys not subscribing are going to miss newspapers when your local city politicians are running all over your jurisdiction and there is no reporters to hold them accountable. 

 
You guys not subscribing are going to miss newspapers when your local city politicians are running all over your jurisdiction and there is no reporters to hold them accountable. 
already happening here. the local paper is mostly not written by any local reporters and hasn't been for quite a while.

any of several newspapers across several counties around here are about 90% the same stories, with different headlines and different paper names.

one is the Gazette, another the Herald, a 3rd the Chronicle... but all the articles are basically exactly the same and they're written by "Reporter - USA TODAY".

 
My home town newspaper is pretty good, Citrus Chronicle. They have been adding fuel to the fire on the controversy of our county commissioners not approving the NY Times for our library system and one boob went so far as to call it "fake news". The story has been on the front page with updates since it broke 3 weeks ago. It is now national news picked up by the W. Post. 

I get the hard copy and read the digital, adding online comments to letters to the editor is a blast.

 
Haven't got a local paper in... forever. 

For a year or two there, I would stop and get a USA Today (or better yet, their Sports Weekly) to read at lunch, but now I just peruse Facebook and/or Twitter.

I should probably get back to doing the paper at lunch during football season to keep my knowledge fresh.

I subscribed to USA Today's Sports Weekly last year and I got added to USA Today's email list, which is IMPOSSIBLE to remove yourself from.  Literally impossible.  

 
I've been reading the paper since I was ten.  We had the Houston Post before the Chronicle took it over.  I had to stop taking the physical paper because I can't get delivery where I now live.  I refuse to get the digital copy because the website and search functions are so bad.  I miss it.  We have a digital subscription to the WaPo, which has a good website.

 
Have had 2 papers delivered for 20 years. LA times and the local Star. First dumped the Star when new ownership gutted content. Scores a day late. Most just USA Today reprints. 
 
May go pure digital with the Times 

 
All digital - 

  • Austin American Statesman
  • NYT
  • WaPo
  • Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston Business Journals
  • Crain's Detroit
 
Mrs. Rannous said:
I've been reading the paper since I was ten.  We had the Houston Post before the Chronicle took it over.  I had to stop taking the physical paper because I can't get delivery where I now live.  I refuse to get the digital copy because the website and search functions are so bad.  I miss it.  We have a digital subscription to the WaPo, which has a good website.
Pretty good app for WaPo too.

 
Yes.  I don't even read the physical copy that much, but my subscription gives me the online access also.

Support local news before it all goes away.  Only a matter of time.

 
Me too. I love my NYTimes Sunday. The articles are intelligently written, and the 1 day a week feeds my newspaper nostalgia. 

Holy hell is it expensive though. $10.25 a week.
mine is only $2.50 per week right now due to a promotion.  I am probably going to switch to digital only when that runs out and try to catch up on this old stuff...

though with this one, I could live with giving them my  money after a billing increase.

 

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