Print Isn’t Dying As Long As There’s Breakfast To Be Had
So, somewhere around the holidays, the Oregonian newspaper started being delivered to our house. We didn’t ask for it, we didn’t pay for it, but every morning without fail, it’s lying outside our front door waiting for me to take it in and read it over breakfast. Originally, it was something that seemed confusing and worrying; we were convinced that we’d get a bill after the fact asking for hundreds of dollars – I don’t know why we thought it’d be asking for that much; it’s not an expensive newspaper – and have to pay it because, well, we’d read and since recycled all those papers, so it’s not like we could give them back, but that disappeared somewhere around Month Two. Now, we’re just used to the routine: Get up, let the dogs out the back so that they don’t piss or shit inside the house, make breakfast and then read the paper.
It’s a weirdly insidious scheme, on behalf of the Oregonian, though; now, if the papers were to stop arriving, I’d miss them. They’ve become part of the morning, like the essential cup of tea and trying to stop the dogs from eating our/the cat’s food (delete as applicable). I’ve become accustomed to pulling out the sections that I don’t care about (Sports always, Business oftentimes, the classifieds and the several million trees’ worth of advertisement sections), scanning the regular op-ed writers, reading Pearls Before Swine… It’s the classic “the first hit is free” thing, except the first hit is actually the first three months’ hits and newspapers instead of The Horse. Dammit, whatever happened to print dying already?
Of course, newspapers are just much more fun to read than laptops at the breakfast table, as well. That’s what they need to fix before the iPad is a winner…
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