Yesterday's news

I've been a loyal newspaper reader since I was a kid. I don't know what got me started, but I tended to read nearly anything and everything in it, whether it was reviews of movies I couldn't see or news stories about stuff that didn't make a lot of sense to me. I cut out some comic strips and pasted them in a spiral bound notebook. I loved a contest that the Dayton Daily News had in which one needed to scour the paper, or maybe just the classified ads, to find each day's special word or clue.

I moved off campus for my senior year of college, and that meant sharing a newspaper subscription with one of my roommates. After I graduated and moved into an apartment of my own I started my own subscription. Getting and reading the newspaper was important to me, and in a way having my own subscription was a mark of adulthood.

I love reading the newspaper, and working for one was a career path I considered. It happened that electronic media is where I ended up, perhaps because I had those college classes first, but there was still a certain mystique about having one's work in print. In 2008 I was paid for a hundred-word movie capsule published in a Nashville, Tennessee alternative weekly. It's the only time I've been a paid writer. I never saw a physical copy of the publication, but knowing that my name was in black and white was a point of pride.

Needless to say, I'm a publisher's dream subscriber. I remain on the younger end of the readership spectrum, and I've been getting the daily paper on my own for nearly fifteen years.

I've now gone a week without having the local newspaper delivered to my home Sunday through Saturday. The last bill I received showed an enormous price increase--it had essentially doubled from a year earlier--and I balked at paying that price. A call to subscriber services got me a reduced rate, but even that discount reflected a hefty raise in the cost. I decided to hold off on making a decision whether to accept this lesser, but by no means insignificant, rate boost.

Then I got distracted by the aftereffects of the car accident and taking care of more immediate matters. The subscription lapsed last Thursday, and no one was answering the subscriber hotline when I called on Wednesday afternoon to suck up the higher cost for another few months.

No paper was on my doorstep the next day. While I did miss seeing it and thought I should follow up and restore my subscription, I decided to give the situation some time. Would I really miss getting the newspaper every morning?

The answer is not a good one for an already struggling industry. Starting the day I have a nostalgic ache for the newspaper. It just doesn't seem right to open the door in the morning and not see it there. Nevertheless, I haven't felt like it's been necessary to renew. There were plenty of days when I never ended up with the time to read it, and the content I do want is accessible online, which I can easily pull up on my computer or iPhone. The time I miss it most is if I'm eating a meal alone somewhere, but in a pinch the smart phone will suffice.

I realize that subscription costs were raised because readers and advertisers are disappearing at an alarming rate, but in this instance the necessity or greed of doubling the subscriber price let me acknowledge what the daily newspaper was worth to me, even on those days I never actually consumed what I purchased.

Yes, I love reading the paper, and I won't hasten to pick one up if having a physical copy is more convenient in a given situation. Still, like so many others, I have a feeling I'm lost as a subscriber and doubt I'll spring for an online subscription if the local paper goes behind a paywall. I'm sad it has come to this, but the information remains accessible. It's just not arriving like a precious gift dropped on the doorstep in the early morning hours anymore.