I probably shouldn’t feel guilty. It’s hard to imagine that canceling our single subscription would be especially devastating for either of these papers. After all, it’s largely the falloff in advertising that’s killing them. No, it’s more the sense I have that if we cancel our subscriptions, my husband and I will be engaging in one of those “micro-behaviors” that taken by themselves aren’t very significant, but that en masse can have a huge and sometimes fatal impact. Buying a huge SUV or leaving the lights on all the time isn’t that morally reprehensible, but if everyone does it, you will look back later and say, Yup, we killed the planet. Not to be melodramatic about it, but canceling newspaper subscriptions is like that for me, and every time I go to cut off one of them, I think to myself, Is this the year you killed the newspaper? That’s when the guilt hits. I want the news to hold on, at least for a while, until it can get a decent toehold on the Internet, or make a living on Kindle subscriptions.
So, yes, the bottom line is, my husband and I will probably be the last poor schmucks still subscribing to all these dying, gasping, rotting newspapers on our lawn, long after everyone else has fled for cyberspace. My husband has taken to joking about it. “We can’t cancel the paper,” he exclaimed the other afternoon, as he gazed out our storm door at the eleven-year-old boy on a bicycle approaching our house, newspaper bag slung over his shoulder. “We can’t put the paper boy out of a job!” Actually, he’s only half kidding. My husband’s a lawyer now, but years ago, growing up in St. Louis, he used to be a paperboy himself, and he takes the whole newspaper failure thing rather personally.
Article comments
1 - dave white
I think in the future we'll be able to order a custom printed paper with all the stuff we want to read.
2 - irv
hard copy (anything) is dying, if not dead already (yet still moving, zombielike). at this point you're fretting over whether to trade in your buggy for one of these newfangled horseless carriages.
3 - Duane Barlow
It used to be satisfying to me to have the tangible, physical paper in my hands, but now I am happy to not have those piles of newspaper thrown throughout the living room.
4 - Joanne Huspek
I don't know. I'm old. It's hard to read a lot on the computer, which is why I print out a lot of stuff, thus using/wasting paper.
Besides, I need those old ones for the bird cage.
5 - melissa
hi
6 - PortiaVyktouria
I love this...so true! But there is something about getting to look over the latest happenings in a paper 'widescreen' format rather than in a digital view with a more restricted focus. Funny how these things work!!