Item — HN Reader

I subscribed to the San Jose Mercury News once because some kid came door to door signing people up as a fundraiser. I gave in because his pitch was so self aware: "Hey man, I know nobody wants the paper, but would you still mind helping me out?"

I did, for $20, and it was an obnoxious several months waiting for the paper to stop. I had twice as much crap to throw away every week as usual, and I didn't read the paper once.

The worst part is that now every newspaper in the bay area has me on their list of people-who-might-buy-a-paper and calls me every two weeks trying to get me to subscribe. When they call I tell them that I'd be happy to subscribe to support the paper if they can guarantee me that I'll never _ever_ receive a physical newspaper. So far none have been able to.

2 comments

This was actually one of the biggest reasons I cancelled my paper subscription too: far too much paper was piling up in my apartment relative to how much reading it provided me. It didn't help that my apartment complex's recycling area was somewhat awkward to get to, and I felt bad throwing the paper in the trash, so it became this perennial TODO item of "clear out huge piles of newspaper clogging the entryway".

Now I subscribe to The Economist, which delivers one, ~100-page magazine a week, which is closer to the amount of in-depth, on-paper news analysis I'll actually read in a given week. It also has a lot less filler that I'd never read, like the pages of sports scores or stock quotes that the local paper liked to include. Somehow in 2010, the idea of printing out thousands of stock prices on a piece of paper every 24 hours seems absurd, like some kind of syslog that logs to a line printer.

You would really give charity to a newspaper?

I guess you could just buy some ads from them.

I give to NPR every year. I don't see much difference in how I should act towards the two organizations despite the newspapers ostensibly being for-profit (ha). I like NPR's product more, but they both provide a really valuable public service that I'm happy to pay for.

I don't know if newspapers can maintain their newsrooms on an NPR-sized budget, but I'd love to see them go that route.