I must say that I have never been much of a newspaper reader per se, and definitely not an avid newspaper buyer, though I have and do read specific articles of interest with interest. However, I do at times rather wonder why so many people still buy newspapers. The chances are very good that many of your local and even national (and international) newspapers are available online to read for free.
I can definitely say that many, if not indeed all, British local newspapers are available online in one way or the other and the formats are great with many allowing you to download individual pages as PDF files.
There are a number of benefits to getting your news online. You no longer need to bundle stacks of newspapers for recycling. You will never have newsprint all over your hands, though the new printing ink has, to an extend, done away with that problem in the UK. You will save the cost of your subscription. You can find just the news you want to read faster online than by thumbing through an actual newspaper. And, I'm sure there are many more.
In London now you don't even have to buy a paper; you can pick up the free Metro on the Tube ( the Metro – hence the name), as well as the London Lite, and others, free. In addition the local papers in the UK are free as long as the boys and girls actually deliver them to your homes. If not then you may have to pay for them; the papers, not the boys and girls. But, you still end up, in any of those cases with newspapers made from trees. Not every good for the poor trees.
I subscribe to news alerts via Google on subjects that are of interest to me and have also, on my “My Yahoo” page a number of feeds from a variety of newspapers so that, should a story be of interest to me, I can go an read online and if I want to I can do a “copy and paste” into the word processor so that I can read it later at my leisure.
This was too I can build up a collection and archive of articles that are relevant to me in my fields of interest without having to have them in box files or such. They are nicely stored on an external hard drive attached to my PC and every now and then some of them get downloaded onto CDs.
Save trees, read your news online and otherwise on your computer.
© Michael Smith (Veshengro), December 2007
Why Buy Newspapers?
