About a month or so ago, my wife responded to a direct mail offer from The Times offering us a 12 week subscription at a ridiculously low price. We took them up on the offer. Hell, we even pushed the boat out and got the thing delivered. A few weeks into the trial, I’m overwhelmed with guilt.Yes, it’s true, I’m guilty. Guilty of ignoring hundreds of thousands (millions, even) of beautifully crafted words. Guilty of turning a blind eye to all those wonderfully shot pictures. There are magazines still languishing in the plastic bag. Crosswords and sudoku puzzles remain unsolved and as for KenKen, well I dinnae even ken what that’s all about. And then there are the ads, hundreds of them at hideous expense that will never get a response from me.As if this wanton neglect wasn’t enough, I’m worried about the trees. Sure, we can recycle (and we do, sneaking the virgin papers out to the blue box in the front garden under cover of darkness) but that newsprint mountain has to be hurting our precarious environment somewhere.The truth is we couldn’t even get through the paper if we wanted to because there isn’t enough time in the day and, anyway, our media consumption habits are just so different these days. We get all the news we need free – which really puts pressure on our half price trial offer. It’s easier, and more convenient to pick news up online in bite size chunks across the working day when more often than not, I’m stuck in front of a screen. I can sift through the RSS feeds. I can pick up snippets on blogs and tweets and follow links on the stuff that interests me. I can scan output from different news sources as well as specialist sites. And that’s before I turn on the myriad of channels available on TV or radio or flick through the Metros that litter my bus. There’s more content out there than I can shake a stick at and, much as I’d love to, I just don’t have the time to wade through a chunky big read like the Times. The truth is, I like the thought of having my newspaper every day. I like waving cheerily to young Elliot, my local paperboy as I open the curtains on another sunny day but beyond that, I can’t quite seem to fit even a compact, tabloid Times into my life. Good news, perhaps, for the trees but probably not such good news for the quality end of the newspaper industry presuming, as the statistics suggest, that I am not alone.
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My kids insisted on watching the first episode of this year's Big Brother last night. Looks like the usual bunch of shallow numpties and vain wannabes. I can hardly wait ...
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Alan Munro
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 01 Sep 2009
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