I think it was a TV moment with Ted Baxter who wanted to invent a newspaper that didn't have black ink that got on your fingers. Unlike Ted, I like that daily feel of newsprint. There was always a morning paper in my home. Sometimes, my father would bring home the first edition at 830PM the night before. Years later when I would take the commuter train to work, I would pick up the NY Daily News at the stand in the Yonkers station.
Old habits didn't die when I moved to Los Angeles. I got the LA Times delivered to my apartment and that happens till this very day. This is despite the fact that the LA Times itself is a piece of liberal-slanted garbage. As long as I could read sports columns about the Dodgers and do the Sudoku puzzle, I was a happy subscriber.
As readership fell or moved over to the digital version, the subscription price slowly went up. As their staff got smaller, the deadline for stories got pushed up to five PM. You get no night baseball game stories or corresponding box scores. Probably much to their delight, the LA Times didn't announce the re-election of Trump until the Thursday after Election Day. One friend of mine in the journalism world told me that the LA Times was now known as a "daily magazine."
Meanwhile, their subscription support staff on call is literally on the other side of the world and practicing extremely broken English. As I found out when I had to call them. You see, my subscription invoice had gotten increased 70 dollars!!!
I asked the incoherent slob on the other end to justify this increase. Production costs, she said. Bullshit, I said. After a frustrating back and forth conversation with Senora Wences, we settled on a thirty dollar hike. We'll see where we are in the fall.
Friends tell me that I should simply relegate myself to the digital subscription which is cheaper.
But then...my fingers won't get dirty.
Dinner last night: Fried chicken sandwich from CHX.
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