I just canceled my subscription to our local newspaper. Again. And this time I mean it. I’ve subscribed to local newspapers, wherever I’ve lived, most of my adult life, and some of my best writing has appeared on newsprint, not on the World Wide Web. But for me, at least, local “paper” newspapers have become obsolete, as have the creaky corporate machines that produce them. It is simply easier to open my laptop computer and click on my favorite news Web sites than to root around in the bushes before dawn, trying to find a newspaper that may or may not have been delivered that morning.

The amount of effort it takes to manufacture and deliver a paper newspaper every day is staggering. Giant (now automated) printing presses roar, ink barrels and pallets of rolled-up newsprint must be handled, and then the printed newspapers need to be moved — without fail — by distributors’ trucks and motor router carriers’ cars to people’s front porches.

Or, more accurately in my experience, to somewhere on or near the subscriber’s property, usually not to the front porch.

A motor newspaper carrier’s job is not easy. I know this because, at one point in my life, I home- delivered up to 300 copies of the New York Times every morning in Huntington, New York. I was an “independent subcontractor,” which meant I provided my own car, gas, and insurance, and got no employee benefits at all. I also got no days off. To earn my “full pay” as a carrier, I had to work seven days a week. I got no extra compensation on days when newspapers came to the local distribution center late due to printing or trucking problems, and I was not paid extra for delivering in hazardous conditions, even during snowstorms so fierce that local police pulled their patrol cars off the road.

And no matter how hard I tried to deliver all those papers where the subscribers could find them, a few went missing every week. It was even worse in snowstorms, when snowplows or residential snow-clearing services often buried the papers I had worked so hard to deliver.

I never read much of the local paper, anyway

The Bradenton Herald, part of the McClatchy (formerly Knight Ridder) chain, is not competitive with the New York Times or Washington Post when it comes to national and international news. Those two newspapers have excellent Web sites, as do many other large-scale publications that are either part of newspaper and magazine operations or that publish strictly on the Internet.

I subscribed to the Bradenton Herald almost entirely for local news reporting, at which it does a fair (but not outstanding) job. Sadly, its Web site is poor and does not seem to carry all of the printed paper’s local content, so doing without the paper version will cut my local knowledge — but will only cut it slightly, because the competing Sarasota Herald-Tribune (a New York Times-owned paper published one town over) has a passable Web site that carries a fair amount of Bradenton news. It is not a good site, mind you; the navigation scheme is poor (sometimes you click on the “editorial” navbar link and get more sports news than editorial or op-ed material), and there are mornings when the old-fashioned proprietary content management system that runs the Herald-Tribune site refuses to deliver stories and even leaves large holes in the main page. Still, despite its low reliability, it is better than the Bradenton Herald’s site, which looks like it is maintained by people who have no real interest or experience in delivering news over the Internet.

Despite their shortcomings, reading the two daily newspapers’ sites successfully feeds my appetite for local news, especially when I augment my daily online reading with an occasional glance at the Sarasota edition of the Creative Loafing weekly, even though most of its content seems to come from the Tampa edition instead of being produced specifically for the Sarasota/Bradenton area.

There’s still a market for physical newspapers

I realize that, especially in an area as full of retirees as this one, paper news still has a place. Not everyone has (or wants) a computer and Internet connection. Unfortunately for newspaper publishers, people at the upper end of the economic spectrum, of all ages, do almost universally seem to have Internet connections. Several months ago I videotaped (for pay) a board meeting at a 2000+ unit upscale condominium complex full of retirees in the Miami area, and when one of the board members asked the approximately 200 people in the room who didn’t use the Internet regularly, only one hand went up — and the woman who raised her hand said that she didn’t need her own computer and Internet connection because, when she wanted to find something on the Internet, she went next-door and borrowed her neighbor’s computer.

In our Bradenton neighborhood, most of the Mexican immigrants I know have Internet connections these days. Even local gang members around here have MySpace pages.

But there will always be holdouts who prefer to hold the news in their hands and to read from paper instead of on a computer screen. There will, no doubt, be fewer of these holdouts every year. And with fewer paper subscribers, motor carriers will drive more miles per paper delivered, which will increase delivery costs — and will probably lead to poorer service, since it’s going to be hard for newspapers to raise subscription rates in a world where printed newspapers have become a less esential part of America’s daily life than they were 10 years ago.

I, however, am no longer one of the holdouts. While I feel sad for the people who work for print newspapers, I am no longer willing to search the front yard and nearby curb in the dark for newspapers I can only find about 70% of the time. (I usually find them after the sun comes up, but by then I’ve read enough news online to fill my appetite for current events.)

Oh, well. I successfully made the transition from wooden boats to fiberglass (because of a hectic schedule that left no time for wooden boat maintenance) and from bias-ply tires to radials (because, depsite their higher cost, they gave better traction and lasted longer). I suppose doing without a paper newspaper is the same as giving up on wooden boats: something to grumble mildly about but not to lose any sleep over. The world changes. Life moves on. We adjust.

I’m sorry, newspaper people. I tried to love you. Really, I did, as hard as I could. But that loved sputtered, waned, and finally went away.

Postscript: since I canceled my Herald subscription several days ago, the newspaper has not only kept coming but is suddenly being conveniently and accurately delivered to our front walk. If past experience with delivery problem complaints is any indication, this will keep up for a few weeks, after which service will go back to its shoddy norm — except this time I will not renew or resubscribe. The pattern of improved service for a brief period after a service complaint, followed by a return to the same-old same-old, has gone on long enough. Others may be willing to play this game, but I have better things to do with my time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 11:03 am and is filed under Bradenton/local, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.