No Quarter for New York Times
Jeff Jarvis is dropping his habit of reading the dead tree version of the NYT because they’re raising prices by a quarter a day.
What’s interesting is it’s chief rival in terms of national prestige, WaPo, has gone the opposite route. I’m a Sunday subscriber to the paper, which I take only for the coupons, sales circulars, and the magazine supplement. They call me every couple of months offering to give me the other six days’ worth absolutely free in order to boost their circulation numbers. I politely decline because, while I’ve sympathetic to their desire to charge higher ad rates, I have no desire to walk down the driveway every day to fetch it and add it to my recycle bin.
Since starting the blog, I’ve simply had no desire to access news in a manner that can’t be instantly hyperlinked and excerpted. Then again, I don’t have a daily subway ride.
When I lived in DC (mid-90s), I was in the opposite camp… I had a subway ride, and I greatly appreciated the cheapness of being able to grab a paper & have something reasonably informative to read on the way in to work. Nowadays, however, I live far away from DC, and even though I still have a bit of a commute, I have no interest at all in getting the local paper. But that may be a side effect of the fact that the local papers most places I’ve been since DC were fairly worthless…