I am usually fairly casual about my finances. Barely a glance at my Mastercard statement. I pay, no questions asked. Until today, when I noticed a monthly charge of $50.32, from New York Times Sales. That struck me as a lot of money, all of a sudden. The representative at the end of the line confirmed that I had been paying that amount for twenty months in a row. One thousand dollars, I could have saved.
Before, – that is when the economy was not such a scary word – I would not have bothered. Fleeting pangs of guilt from my budding green conscience, and thoughts of all the trees downed because of my indulgence, did not make a difference. I continued to read, and then quickly dispose of the daily paver that made its way to my door every morning. Promising myself that one day, I would switch to an online subscription.
This morning, I resisted the advances of the New York Times representative to cut me a deal. Half price for sixteen weeks. Or maybe just the Sunday paper. Or would I prefer the weekday edition? No, I told him, I had made up my mind. With the economy, I could no longer afford the superfluous expense of $50.32, or any other amount. Plus, it’s bad for the trees anyway.
I never knew that NY Times was so expensive.
I convinced my mother to switch back to a weekend (friday+saturday) subscription of her newspaper. We didn’t get around to reading it often anyway.
But for me the main trigger for asking her to switch (well, I called the sales desk afterward) was that I hated to see all this paper go into recycling. In one month, a daily newspaper means a huge pile of paper. Less coming into your house means less to throw away. I like to make life as easy as possible.
WOW! I pay $200/year for the Washington Post delivered daily and that’s a lot.
No wonder the fourth estate is going down the drain; no one can afford the subscriptions!
D
can you hear the mountain tops laughing to the skies? the roar of societal collapse leaves whole segments of the population to recycle their livelihood.
janitors are waiting for the CEOs bonus to trickle down, truck drivers are home with the children, loggers, miners, trees and ink berries are idle in the wilderness.
can you hear the trees laughing in what many perceive as our demise?
Nadine, how good it feels to have you back. You gifting us with your poetic words is such a treat! The trees laughing . . . I like that image. A lot.
Dan, agree. Newspapers need a different business model. I do love the New York Times though . . . I think a donation model for the online paper, maybe with pledge drives such as NPR, may be more appropriate.
Meryn, thanks for sharing. I must say I am quite happy with the thought of soon having an empty recycling bin. Better for my wallet, less work, better for the trees! What took me so long . . .
We gave up paper newspapers six years ago.
The price of recycled paper has dropped so much than many communities no longer recycle – it goes right to the landfill. Communities that do recycle find they have to find money to run the operation — no longer any profit.
yes, recycling has become a myth. there is also the energy required to recycle.
“Newspapers need a different business model.”
I hope that the NY Times makes their authors/journalists more prominent. You could see journalists as full time bloggers, possibly with a research team behind it. I’d rather pay for specific journalists/teams than for the whole paper. I’m only reading a very select part of the articles I think. But I very much appreciate that – for example – Andrew Revkin is on the payroll there.
I hope that dead-tree newspapers are something of the past soon.
Marguerite,
I attended a conference on women’s health and the environment earlier this year. An investigative reporter from a midwestern newspaper was there reporting on the work she’d done to ferret out the link between chemicals in our personal care products and cancer. She made an impassioned plea to the audience to continue to subscribe to newspapers so that the kind of investigative journalism she and others do can continue. I was convinced of her argument. I, too, subscribe to the New York Times. Most of the time, I can’t think of a better way to spend $50 a month. The writing is exemplary, the reporting usually enlightening, and the mix of news is of far greater interest than what is reported on television, cable, or, honestly, on many Internet sites. Yes, I could get it all for free on the Internet. But that only means that corporations would be paying for the content via their ads. I prefer to pay for it myself, in the hopes I’m protecting some small corner of the generally impartial coverage the Times presents. When I think about cancelling my $50/month, I think of my own effort to disseminate news. I believe its value extends far beyond $50/month. It certainly costs me more than $50/month to provide it. But I firmly believe that if we don’t pay for things we value, we lose what’s valuable to us in the world.
Diane, I understand and appreciate your motivation for supporting good reporting. At the same time, there are some other parameters worth considering. Trees and the energy it takes to recycle paper is one. The other is of allocation of limited personal resources in this economy. I can think of many great causes I would like to support, in addition to the NY Times and other great news sources. The press and content providers in general have to find a new business model, fast. Time for some creative thinking here . . .
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