Reading Joe's thread on the car magazines that are ceasing printing and going to the web exclusively, made me think about the newspaper print and delivery lifespan. I still enjoy reading a newspaper at 6:30am in morning that has been delivered to our door. Reading while eating breakfast, drinking a coffee or sitting on the throne . Reading a newspaper online. doing a crossword, Sudoku & word Jumble electronically is not the same for me. Our local newspaper has gone publishing from 6 days a week down to 5 days a week for the same price and about a 1/4 the content... I can see in a few years there won't be delivery I bet. None of my 30 year old kids subscribe to the paper, let alone a land line/voip home phone... Surfing is done on their cell phones. Electronic evolution I guess. Jmo.

 

I have not had a newspaper (or any other subscription) delivered to my house in years because the value vs cost is not justifiable any longer. I cut out a lot of unnecessary expenses years ago when I came up with a plan to and eventually retire early. I found I don't miss them... While most of us look back fondly of the old days of newspaper delivery boys on their bikes, the milk man leaving glass bottles of fresh milk and butter, a real delicatessen or bakery, and the peace and tranquility of a land line, times have changed. Some for the better and some for the worst.

 

I like rolling up a car mag, sticking it in my pocket, and taking it to lunch. I can read it easily, I don't have to scroll up and down and back and forth, and the pictures are large enough to see the car. I don't have to carry my iPad, I don't have to worry about battery life, I don't have to worry about someone stealing my iPad if I get up to go to the restroom mid-meal. Forget about reading a mag on a phone. That's a fruitless endeavor. Digital sucks.

My wife is an avid reader. she now (very reluctantly) has a Kindle, since her vision is deteriorating and she can make the type on the Kindle large enough to read. Otherwise, she would still be reading paper books.

Plus, the way I read it, subscribers to the mags involved will receive a sub to Motor Trend Digital. If the mags involved are not going away, why am I being offered a consolation prize? So, they are not going to digital. SOME of their content will be available digitally, but the mags themselves will cease to exist.

This is a very sad day indeed.

 

A lot of our preferences come from childhood--the way we learned to interact with the written word. I can read printed material about 4x faster than the same content on a mobile phone. But an e-book reader is a decent substitute for printed pages. For me, it doesn't work as well for magazines, however.

I gave mobile phones a good try (~20 years) before I concluded that a number of drawbacks justified my getting a VOIP phone recently...

• Poor voice quality
• Poor reception--just a fact of where I live
• Extensive data gathering and lack of privacy--it seems to have become a spy device that you can also make calls on
• Growing body of research about negative neurological effects of their electro-magnetic radiation

So I keep my mobile on Airplane Mode until I need to use it. My friends quickly learned to call my VOIP when they wanted to talk.

 

I find it much more difficult and time consuming to read a document on the computer, and my Yoga laptop folds to tablet form. Scrolling takes too long and out where I live our internet connection is slow and spotty. I've occasionally read the WashPost digital version (a PDF of the print version) and I hate it. You have to scroll and then zoom in on the article you want to read. It's a PITA. Yes, there is also digital content that you read in a browser instead of the PDF print version. I don't like that either.

You kids get off my lawn.

 

I can't use a tablet or phone to read, rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick. I prefer to cruise the internet on my laptop with a real keyboard.

 

Cruising the interwebs is not the same as trying to read a document.

 

That's one of those rare comments that rates an LOL, not just a L. Good one, Joe.

 

I guess pdf's are not documents...

 

Yes, a lot of changes over the last decade and half. Heck 23 years ago I moved to my present house. I was the young guy in my late 20's. My last elderly neighbors just moved out and I just realized, damn I am now the old guy on the block in all directions! But I can still work circles around all my younger neighbors.

Pat

 

An interactive website designed to be displayed on a computer screen is different from a PDF, which is essentially a photograph of a printed page.

 

We still have a landline from the LEC. Interestingly enough, we only use that number/line for our small rental property management firm, both voice and fax. We use our mobiles almost exclusively for everything else. I dropped my newspaper sub years ago. Preceding the interweb by about 10 years, Denver/Front Range used to have two major daily's about 25 years ago (dates are fuzzy). Because of the stiff competition, ad rates were pennies on the dollar compared to other markets. You could run a 10 day, five line ad for about 10 bucks! It was awesome. They even ran firearms ads - egad! Even better, each paper catered to opposite political tastes, so there was something for everyone. My dad subscribed to both to get both sides of the "argument" as well as two sets of Funnies on Sunday mornings. Then one day the smaller of the two papers (by a few 10's of thousands subscribers) put in a bid to buy the bigger paper. They eventually did so, attempting to keep the content, writers, editors, etc. separate, but under one Operating Company. The first thing that failed (immediately) was advertising costs. Now that there was no more "competition," they said that prior rates were "artificially low." They quintupled or more the cost of ads! Guess what happened to their revenue. Since then the left-leaning Operating Company closed down the right-leaning paper altogether, letting go all the staff. Now you get only one perspective in print, and ad prices are ridiculous, so there are basically no private ads. And they went full-on PC, so no more firearms ads. Now their print version is a ghost of its former self. You can read the "fluff" for free on the online version and get inundated by ads, but if you want real news/content - that is behind a pay wall. Guess where their revenue is now.

I still buy hardback books in my interest of WWII. I, like other posters, don't feel "right" reading on a tablet or e-reader. Something about the heft of a hardback, along with ease of flipping pages quickly to find maps, pics, certain passeges, etc.wins out for me.

 

I have had a landline since 1971 and will never be without one. I guess my age is showing (75) but I refuse to get a flat, smart phone, I have a flip phone. Don't need one to look at messages. If it is so important to text rather call, then I don't need the information. I still want to read a printed page, have years of mags stored in boxes to refer back to for information, etc...

 

I agree 100% that cell phones and software web browsers are digital spies. I'm not convinced that cell phones cause much of a health hazard though. Everyone of us is inundated with RF radiation everyday and it has negligible health effects. If cell phones and non-ionizing RF radiation cause cancer then I will be comin' down with it any day since I work around FAA radars.

FWIW, I've been using my phone to post on the site for the past 1/2 hour and it's a PITA. I should get up and get the laptop but I'm too lazy. Anyways...

 

I prefer a newspaper, just for the funnies!

 

I quoted this because I thought it was a perfect spot for a newspaper funny. My Mother-in-law lives in Greenbrier County WV, and she sent us a few copies of this paper, to share with friends. I have to say that at least in a digital copy, you can blame a mistake on a click of a button. With a newspaper article, I believe it has to go through at least a couple hands, before it gets released for print... 🤪

 

I took a technological step backwards a few years ago and ditched cable tv, climbed up on the roof, and installed an antenna. I have two teenage sons, and we went back to the old-fashioned method of watching our favorite network shows LIVE, instead of relying on a dvr. Now, we still utilize streaming services such as Hulu (the 5.99 plan), Netflix, Prime Video, etc, but the amount I pay for my high-speed internet vs having cable tv is well over $1000/year less. The biggest drawback to doing this is sports, but since all the Michigan pro sports franchises absolutely STINK right now and have for a few seasons, I'm not really missing much.

(For those of you that don't know, streaming resolution for sports is goddamn awful, no matter how fast your internet connection is.)

 

I'm actually using Rogers IPTV where I live. It actually works quite well and the boxes support 4K. I switched from Digital cable to it. The digital packages will be gradually phased out around where I live, what I'm told anyways . I'm not ready to give my TV sports stations as I like live sports and live events. It's bad enough the internet based lags a bit behind the live digital as you get notices on your phone..... kids complain about their fantasy stats during the games.
It was a big deal for me to get rid of my landline and go voip through OOMA. Saves around $75 per month. Only draw back is the phone doesn't work during an hydro outage... Cell phone comes in handy then. Someday the OOMA will probably go. Being a past Bell Repairman it wasn't an easy move as I still collect old phones... It comes down to money. I couldn't justify the $80 @ month anymore for telemarketers. Not many people call me on the house phone anyways.
The wireless radio waves worry me a bit with everything going wireless.
Internet Router wireless /IPTV wireless
Cell phones
Home phone handsets

Jeff

 

I don't care to read newspapers, but I can't line the bottom of my birds cage with an iPad.

 

Land lines are an artifact of the history of telephony. If telephone service had started from the very beginning as an over-the-airwaves service, we would have had the equivalent of portable cell phones right from the start, and there never would have been landlines. But we started out with telephone wires, and the most logical thing to do was to run wires to individual buildings, residences, and so forth just as was done with the first electric wires when widespread electrification began at the end of the 19th century.

But think about it. People calling your landline phone number don't want to talk to your house, they want to talk to you. We got rid of our land lines in 2008 and have never looked back. When people dial my phone number, they want to talk to ME, wherever I am. Ditto for my wife and her cell phone. If I'm not in a position to take the call, I let it go to voicemail and return the call later.

 

Ever see photos of early 1900s city streets? The telephone poles and wiring were something to see. At the beginning, technology did not permit more than one telephone line per pair of wires, so there needed to be a separate pair of wires run from the central office to the telephone at the other end of the line for every telephone in service. So telephone poles had multiple crossbars, and there were telephone wires strung everywhere. Later advances allowed multiplexing, where separate phone lines can be run over the same pair of wires but at different frequencies, and the burying of phone lines wherever possible, finally made the necessity of so many phone wires obsolete.

Here's an American city street in 1908. Note the telephone poles.

 

Newspapers? I don't subscribe, I just read what I want online, from a few favorite sources.
Land line? We gave that up once we got cellphones
No regrets..

 

I still have a newspaper delivered every day and I am probably one of very few in my neighborhood that still does so. The expense of this paper is probably one of the most extravagant expenses I have but I will continue it because I like it.

 

I was old before I became old.

I work on and fix computer systems all day for the government. But at heart, I am not a techy. Here's what makes me old.

1. I have a landline.
2. I do not own a cell phone and have never sent a text.
3. I do not have any type of social media platform at all.
4. I like reading the paper. My kids like to read the comics from the Sunday edition and I still clip coupons.
5. When I get home from work, I rarely get on the computer.
6. We eat dinner as a family every night and I enforce a strict "no phone" rule. We actually eat and discuss our day together.

I'm sure there are more, but I'm old and have already forgotten what they may be.

 

chip, Good for you

 

I could go on and on and on on this topic. Like the OP, I too enjoy have the paper in-hand for reading. Like others, I abhor the cost of such privilege.

Plus, I have to say, the content quality is in a state of continual decline. Example - During the baseball season the standings are a day behind and one must go online to get correct standings and results!

For me, another big problem is missed deliveries. In the "good ol' days" when one did not get their paper you could call the paper and the subscription fulfillment/customer service department would get it out to you post-haste. Well, those days are gone. Now one is given a credit for the missed paper and advised they can read the paper online.

Duh! If I wanted to read the damn paper online, why would I be paying the high cost of a print subscription?

I have to agree, the days of hardcopy newspapers are limited.

 

In the '90's, I was in the Navy and stationed in England. We lived off base and for 20 pounds every 2 weeks, we had an honest to god MILKMAN. The local dairy would drop off 3 quarts of milk (or cream, orange juice, chocolate milk) first thing every morning on our front doorstep. They were even in the glass bottles with the foil caps. I loved it!! Not only was it fresh, it saved me the 20 minute drive to the commissary for that chore.

 

Someone needs to start old town! I hate the new hi technology world and long for old ways. If I had the money I would buy a town and do just that get rid of hi tech.

 

Interestingly, my wife and I got a free subscription to the Oklahoman from a family friend. It was delivered pretty regularly for about a year. I would occasionally read the funnies or the headlines. After a year we got a bill from the customer service department. It was at that time that I had to jump through hoops of fire to get the bill and subscription cancelled. My wife and I had never signed a contract or contacted customer service with a credit card number to sign up. Sadly, more often than not I just threw away the paper.

 

You could move into an area among Amish people. This might be easier to do than finding a town for sale.

 

We foster puppies so we subscribe to use the newspaper to line the puppy cages. We also read the paper but it's becoming more a thing of the past.

 

I worked in a dairy in England for a while, maintaining the plant, and looking after the fleet of EVs, better known as milk floats. I have to say battery powered vehicles have come a long way ....

Roger.

 

I dropped the Dallas Morning News years ago. It seems they changed inks on some sections of the daily and on a lot of the sections in the Sunday paper. I had an allergic reaction to the new ink and Sneezed my fool head off. Out of tradition, we still run out and buy the DMN on Thanksgiving Day...for the ads. The Queen and our daughters head out and go shopping after the second big wave hits the stores. I refer to it as "Opening Day". They continue this tradition, even though 95% of their shopping is on-line. My office has become a mini-distribution point for Amazon Prime. 8. Count 'em 8 packages arrived yesterday.

 

How the Loss of the Landline Is Changing Family Life

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...ife/ar-AAK3Uxq

 

The only reason I got a mobile phone was a few years ago, when I took over the internet sales dept at work. Up till then I think I was one of 5 people without one. When I retired, I decided to keep it in case of emergency when I drive the Cutlass as I go to shows with a 300 mile round trip. It remains mostly silent with my small circle of friends and I have the smallest data plan available for GPS, because I don't generally use it for the internet. For me its more of a tool than a social device.

 

Here's a town for the tech free.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/0...without-wi-fi/

 

Thanks for sharing Kenny! Here's more info.

https://greenbankobservatory.org/sci...elescopes/gbt/

 

Right in that same area is the Cass Railroad. A must ride for any train enthusiast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cass_S...oad_State_Park
Just make sure to have a good old-fashioned GPS like a Garmin, or a paper map. Your cell phone and maps apps won't do you a bit of good since you lose cell service long before you get there.

.

 

You can load maps onto your phone beforehand. GPS works without cell service.