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I started feeling that way a couple of years ago, and currently have three online newspaper subscriptions, two national and one local. I mostly end up getting t
by SwellJoe 9y ago
I started feeling that way a couple of years ago, and currently have three online newspaper subscriptions, two national and one local. I mostly end up getting to those stories from Twitter links (or from facebook for stories in the local paper), rather than the front page of the paper, but real journalism is absolutely vital to a functioning democracy (and ours is in a dangerous place right now), so I want to contribute to that.
As an aside: WaPo is cheap-as-free if you have an Amazon Prime subscription (several months free, and then the price goes up to something like the price of a cup of coffee every month), and they've broken a number of really important stories just in the past couple of years. I can't think of many reasons for folks who already have Prime to not have a WaPo subscription. It's good, neutral and well-sourced, journalism at a great price, so it's one of my national paper subscriptions.
- fma 9y agoNY Times and Washington Post were breaking a lot of important stories. I decided to subscribe to NY Times - because Washington Post has the backing of billionaire Jeff Bezos. I felt NY Times needed the $10 a month from me more. I really wanted to get paper delivery, but the price was just too high. Also it would probably be unrealistic that I actually read the paper - as I do most of my reading when I have a few idle minutes. A few years ago I subscribed to The Economist...you can find it at a good price on slickdeals once in a while. Their articles were highly indepth and provided a good international perspective...even in magazine format I couldn't read even half of the content.
- SwellJoe 9y agoNYTimes is my other national subscription...but I didn't mention them because I'm a bit more ambivalent about them. I'm uncomfortable with how eager they've been to support war; not just the Iraq war, when they published a number of falsehoods that helped sell the war, but more recently as well (even while publishing a bunch of "mea culpa" articles about their role in selling the falsehoods that led to the Iraq war). The Times seemingly never met a foreign war they didn't like. They also have a history of compromising the integrity of their stories or editorial pages to suit the government (e.g. WRT the Snowden leaks, and war coverage) or corporations (e.g. on climate change). I still think they're a top-tier organization in the field, certainly above 99% of everything else out there, I just wish I could trust them more. That they're great 99 times out of 100 doesn't mean it's not really frustrating when their rare fuck ups are so monumental and occasionally disastrous in their outcome (Iraq war, President Trump; NYTimes didn't cause either problem, but they helped).