The Sunday Times

Yesterday morning, I read part of this past Sunday's New York Times while eating my breakfast before heading to my part time job. Having recently moved to a new apartment, every Sunday the Times shows up on my doorstep and sits there for at least two or three days, at which point it finds our way into our kitchen because no one else has claimed it.

I had never read the Times before, so I figured I'd give it a try. If you have never read it either, I would advise bringing a backpack or a suitcase with you if you planning on travelling anywhere with it. While I found the articles to be quite intriguing, I must say better than The Boston Globe, a paper I read more frequently, I couldn't help my gaulk at the size of this newspaper. It starts off with the usual front page headlines and the first section, mostly comprised of articles related to international happenings. I soon realized that there were two different large sections, each with probably four sections of their own. When I had picked up the paper on the porch, I thought there must have been two copies. I now realized, while sucking down my morning cup of joe, that these weren't two copies. This was all one paper.

So I started flipping through the pages. Section one, we'll call it, had the front page section, "New York", "Sports Sunday", and "Sunday Styles", an editorials section, and for everyone who missed the weekly editions, the "Week in Review"for a total of 92 pages. And thats just section one so stay with me here.

Section two contains: "Art and Leisure", "Travel", the weekly "Book Review", and if regular newspaper sections weren't enough, they have two different magazines, "The New York Times Magazine" and "The New York Times Style Magazine", both printed in color. Oh, I forgot a small clothing company ad book that is "an exclusive offer for NYT readers. This section tallied a whopping 308 pages! All in all, the contents of the paper totaled 400 pages, and the thing has to weigh close to five pounds.

So I got thinking, who actually has the time to read this entire paper in one day? It would take the average reader more than a day to get through it all. And better yet, since I doubt every subscriber does, there must be an enormous amount of paper that gets printed every week that will likely find its way to a landfill, or really numerous landfills all around the country, without ever have been read.

With all that, it's really no surprise that printed media has fell by the wayside while things like Kindle and online news have surged in popularity. There is little waste (don't forget that the electricity or batteries used to get your news this way probably comes from a coal plant), and instead of flipping through these four hundred pages, the reader has what he wants when he wants it. And the thing that I enjoy about reading my news online is that, when I come across something that I've never heard of or I think is a little suspiscious (notice how many newspaper articles rarely reveal where they got their information? that just leads me to believe they are making most of it up), I can just open another browser and dig a little deeper. You can't do that with a physical newspaper.

Moral of the story is, printed news is a thing of the past. Its wasteful, expensive, and not the most user friendly. If newspaper companies really wanted to get creative, they could send you a recyclable media device that you could pop in a computer and access stuff that no one else can. Sort of a digital subscription to your doorstep (or inbox). Just a thought, but my point is that unless they creative at making money in some way, their ability to compete with e-news is only going to get worse.