Sock knitting ban

I stumbled upon a newspaper article from 1942 about the war board requesting socks no longer be knitted for soldiers overseas. Going by this piece, it seems that knitters have always been a feisty bunch. I highly recommend you check it out.

Body of lies

I'm not in the business of killing rumors, but I'd like to believe that slowly but surely I'm doing my part to cast skepticism on a particular one.

Last July I wrote a blog entry taking on the knitting world's burning question: does Russell Crowe knit? I concluded that in spite of news stories claiming that the actor knits, there's no evidence to support it. This "fact" about him gets repeated but has only the flimsiest of support. Maybe it is true, but the reporting on the matter is less than convincing.

I don't check site traffic nearly like I used to, but it never fails that the Russell Crowe knitting question gets hits on a regular, if not daily, basis. Out of the 1300+ entries on this blog, I'm fairly confident that it is the most read one. And now it's been referenced in a Los Angeles Times blog entry about the star's falsely rumored death.

The funny thing is that the writer of a story about an internet rumor initially passed along the usual line about Crowe being a knitter before a commenter chimed in that he isn't. My blog post on the topic is the top search result on Google for the question, which is likely why it's now linked in the LA Times piece. I expect this has expanded the exposure for my take on the matter, and maybe, just maybe, getting it in any form in a major media outlet will begin to erode what's always been a mostly unsupported claim.

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.

Black and white and read all over

I suspect that I am a rare breed among those in my age group. I am a longtime newspaper subscriber. I got a subscription once I was on my own after college and have had it ever since. I read the newspaper with regularity as a kid and have really never stopped.

Recent years have not been kind to the newspaper industry. The internet has cannibalized a lot of the audience because much of the content is available online for free. The Columbus Dispatch tried putting articles behind a pay wall a few years ago but eventually relented. Their reason for backing off seems pretty obvious. Not enough people were willing to pay for the content, so they just went elsewhere.

Yesterday I received a letter informing me that my subscription rate will be increasing at the start of the next billing cycle. The shocker was what the new price will be. It's going up an unbelievable 48% from when I was last charged in November and 51% from a year ago. (I'm paying about $44 per thirteen weeks of delivery. The adjusted price is approximately $84 over the same time period.)

I still prefer to read a physical newspaper, but as much as it hurts me to cancel the subscription, there's simply no way I can justify paying that kind of exorbitant increase. I expect my reaction is or will be a common one among subscribers. If this is a tactic to keep the paper financially strong, the result may hasten its death instead.

I don't know how healthy its finances are, but this reeks of desperation. I checked out the subscription rates posted online. A discount is shown only for subscribing every day. All the other packages show "convenience" as the savings off the newsstand price. The weird thing is that the Sunday only price is actually 99 cents more than what's listed on the product itself. (Perhaps this means the price is going up.) Whatever, the case, so much for considering getting just the Sunday paper. Just getting it would roughly cost what an annual subscription has been.

I guess I better enjoy the papers that will still be coming until early March. After that a regular part of my longtime daily routine will come to an end.

Addendum: I think my percentages are off and should be double what I have listed, but you get the point.