Daily Reading: How Do I Allocate?
I spend about a fifty cents a day to subscribe to the local newspaper, the Portland Press Herald. It's a decent local paper servicing the largest city in Maine, one of about 70,000 people. But is it worth close to two hundred dollars a year?
--------------
Compare this cost to what I spend on my many weekly and monthly magazines; about a dollar an issue per. I subscribe to weeklies Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. ESPN The Magazine comes every two weeks. I get Vanity Fair, Muscle and Fitness, Vogue, Men's Fitness, Maxim, Playboy, and probably a few others I can't think of offhand. All for a couple of hundred bucks a year, or roughly comparable to what I spend on my daily paper.
And it has occurred to me that I get much more enjoyment, information, and quality news from these magazines than from the PPH.
Why are daily newspaper dying out across America? Maybe because the quality of the reporting is so weak. It takes about fifteen minutes to read my paper nowadays, and I concentrate on the sports section and local news. Does the information I receive justify the expense? I'm not sure, but it is surprising to me that I am even considering this question, as reading a daily has been part of my routine since I was in my early teens.
----------------
Much of living a life involves cost/benefit analysis. Should I take a shower today? It will cost me about ten minutes of time but leave me feeling refreshed and alert, thus, most folks opt to take a daily shower. Should I speed on my way to work? Speeding will decrease my commute time but also increase greatly the chances of getting in an accident or getting a ticket, so most people use caution and drive close to the posted speeds. And my reading time, so dear to me and so vital to understanding the world I live in, has become an active cost/benefit equation in which the time and money spent or reading the paper may not justify the benefit.
--------------
Compare this cost to what I spend on my many weekly and monthly magazines; about a dollar an issue per. I subscribe to weeklies Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. ESPN The Magazine comes every two weeks. I get Vanity Fair, Muscle and Fitness, Vogue, Men's Fitness, Maxim, Playboy, and probably a few others I can't think of offhand. All for a couple of hundred bucks a year, or roughly comparable to what I spend on my daily paper.
And it has occurred to me that I get much more enjoyment, information, and quality news from these magazines than from the PPH.
Why are daily newspaper dying out across America? Maybe because the quality of the reporting is so weak. It takes about fifteen minutes to read my paper nowadays, and I concentrate on the sports section and local news. Does the information I receive justify the expense? I'm not sure, but it is surprising to me that I am even considering this question, as reading a daily has been part of my routine since I was in my early teens.
----------------
Much of living a life involves cost/benefit analysis. Should I take a shower today? It will cost me about ten minutes of time but leave me feeling refreshed and alert, thus, most folks opt to take a daily shower. Should I speed on my way to work? Speeding will decrease my commute time but also increase greatly the chances of getting in an accident or getting a ticket, so most people use caution and drive close to the posted speeds. And my reading time, so dear to me and so vital to understanding the world I live in, has become an active cost/benefit equation in which the time and money spent or reading the paper may not justify the benefit.
posted by joe sweeney at 6:03 AM
1 Comments:
nice post. thanks.
Post a Comment
<< Home