For my first 19 years in Florida I didn’t subscribe to any newspaper. I worked for one. Monday through Friday I’d pick up a copy in the newsroom and on Sunday I’d go to Bob’s and shell out a dollar. Things written about in Saturday’s paper, as far as I was concerned, never happened.
In 2008, the Sun-Sentinel laid me off and I immediately took out a subscription to the Herald. I don’t remember what it cost then, but now it's $89 a month. For much less than that I can go to Bob’s and buy the weekly Spectator which, being British, has an irreverent flair that long ago disappeared from American journalism. But it doesn’t tell me what’s happening in Wynwood.
I suspect that the exorbitant subscription price is part of the paper’s effort to wean readers off the print edition so the company can eventually kill it. I don’t like reading online because I spend most of my day staring into a screen. Yet I grasp the absurdity, in the age of the Internet, of gathering news and information, waiting 24 hours to print it on paper, and then delivering thousands of these papers to individual houses and apartments.
It’s just that sometimes I like absurdity. But not at $89 a month.
