[patio11]

I'm 28 now. I grew up reading three papers every day, and most of my bonding time with my father was with us sharing papers at the kitchen table. I graduated from a pretty good university more than half a decade ago. I was a gainfully employed professional, and now I'm a small business owner. Everything about me suggests that I should be an exceptionally good newspaper customer.

And I can scarcely imagine buying a newspaper subscription. The notion is downright puzzling, like someone suggesting I sew all my own clothes. I mean, sure, somebody somewhere must enjoy sewing all their own clothes, but me? Really? Like, with thread? You expect that from me?

[axod]

Reading a newspaper is a completely different experience to getting all your news online.

I started getting newspapers delivered when I was about 20 (I'm 32 now).

The funny thing is people who moan on and on and make fun of people who get their news from Fox news, with its obvious biases. But then they themselves get their news solely from Reddit, The daily show, Twitter?!! etc with their even more obvious biases and inaccuracies.

I'll always buy a newspaper, it won't be my only source for news by any means, but it's something to read at the breakfast table etc. It gives me a neat already compiled summary of what's going on. No website I've ever seen can do that well.

I don't understand your analogy with sewing. Getting a newspaper is getting an edited summary of the days news. It's a finished garment. You choose whichever paper seems to fit with your own particular politics and they do all the work for you. Getting your news yourself, trying to sort the biases out, trying to get rid of all the inaccurate news - that's like someone suggesting you sew all your own clothes. The web is full of so much crap, how do you know what to believe? How do you know what's important?

If I got all my news online, either I'd waste all day trying to find articles, fact check, work out what's going on, or I'd have such an inaccurate and biased picture of the world I'd be worrying forever about stupid things - eg if you only looked at Reddit you'd be forever worrying about gay marriage, CCTV in Britain, and all the other things Reddit loves to worry about. In fact I'd say Reddit has pretty much turned into the opposite of Fox News, which isn't a good thing at all.

[_delirium]

I guess I don't see what's totally different between reading printed newspapers and reading any of those same newspapers on the internet. If you subscribe to the New York Times, and I read nytimes.com, how is the news we're reading any different in terms of article quality, nice summary of the news, etc.? When I think of "getting news online", I think of basically that: the same newspapers you could buy, except now they're on the internet.

[ecuzzillo]

The profile of how I read a paper newspaper and an online one is drastically different. The first bit of each story in a paper newspaper requires zero activation energy or decision-making on my part to read, so I end up reading the first bits of most of the stories on the front page until and unless I find something sufficiently interesting to warrant flailing and fighting and folding the paper back and forth until I get the rest of it.

Online, I scan headlines until I find one sufficiently interesting to click on, and then I read the whole article.

The result is that the paper newspaper is a better survey of what's going on, since reporters are good at getting the high bits of the story in the part on the front page.

That doesn't mean I'd subscribe to a paper paper, though.