As I kid I looked forward to the time between 3 and 4 pm each afternoon when the Standard Examiner paper would land on our porch. The Standard was and still is the local newspaper for Northern Utah including Ogden. If I could beat my dad to the porch, I’d take the paper into our living room and lay it out on the carpet. I’d start with the comics section. Frank and Ernest and Born Loser were my two favorites. I’d move on to the sports section and finish up with the ads. Sunday’s edition was my favorite of the week because it included “The Parade” insert. I always made sure to fold the paper back just right for my dad. Sometimes one of our cats would run across the stretched out paper and wrinkle it.
Even during the years I was a poor college student, I made sure to budget enough money to subscribe to the Salt Lake Tribune. When I moved to Seattle I took the Seattle Times and the Wall Street Journal for a while. But as I began to spend more time on the internet I found unread papers stacking up outside my door. It wasn’t long before I decided to cancel our paper subscriptions. 
That was about eight years ago. On two separate occasions we’ve tried subscribing to only the Sunday edition of the Seattle Times but that was primarily for Kim to peruse the ads. It never lasted more than a few months.
I can’t imagine ever subscribing to another newspaper again. MSNBC, Digg, Fark, Twitter and RSS feeds are now my sources of news for better and for worse. When big news breaks today I’m far more likely to hear about it on Twitter than on CNN or the radio. The thought of waiting for the paper the next morning never crosses my mind anymore. And have you seen the local news lately? It’s so embarrassingly terrible it’s not even worth tuning in for the weather. I now get my weather through a Google Desktop Gadget which sure beats the phoney banter between the weatherman and anchor.
I suspect that one day I’ll receive a lot of my news through my phone. I’m starting to get more of it that way mostly through RSS as the web on my Motorola Q isn’t a great experience. But it’s weird to think that my kids may never know what a newspaper is. I guess they will miss out on some good comics.
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