paperless

Starting this last week, there's been a change in our daily routine. For the first time since ... forever, actually ... nobody's going outside to fetch the morning newspaper. We've canceled our hard-copy subscription. The price kept going up and up, and it was the cost of the physical paper and printing that was doing it. But we're keeping the online subscription, which costs a lot less.

For years now, when we've been on trips it's been B's habit to read the facsimile edition of our local paper from the web on her tablet over breakfast, and now she just does that at home too. My own tablet is too small in size and too slow to make the facsimile edition very useful, but I can always read the articles through the webpage. And I read a lot of news articles while sitting at my desktop. Besides our local paper, the San Jose Mercury News, I keep subscriptions to the Washington Post, which I find continually interesting, and the San Mateo Daily Journal, the paper I write concert reviews for. I also read articles on the Guardian, which is free (and which asks for donations which I might give them if they ever stop being transphobic), and as long as I remember to delete cookies in advance every time, I can read an occasional article from the New York Times. Otherwise I stick mostly to commentary magazines like Slate.

I've had some amazing difficulties with newspaper delivery in the distant past, but our delivery here was pretty good, except for the occasional undelivered Sunday paper and the couple times a month they'd forget and give us the Chinese-language paper instead. But that's gone now.

Meanwhile, my brother and I had a Zoom chat with the latest winner of the copy-editor's award we established in our mother's memory at the paper where she worked as an undergraduate, the University of Michigan Daily. That we like to know where our donation is going is our motive; curiosity on the recipient's part as to where it came from was hers. Among other things we learned that the Daily is almost entirely online these days, there being virtually nobody on campus to pick up a physical copy. So the inexorable trend continues ...