Several years ago I decided to stop getting Readers Digest. They sent me many, many "last issues" (maybe a years worth) I read the magazines, but ignored the last chance warning. Then they tried to bill me. Constantly. Borderline harrassment. I really got ugly with someone on the phone and it quit. When my sister and her DH bought a house it had dual zoning. Because it had an expiration to the business side of the zoning, he recorded a business name he someday hopes to open. They get loads of free magazines they never asked for. It comes addressed to their "business"...which does not yet exist.

I don't buy magazines anymore - they are way too expensive for my budget. I used to love Martha Stewart for baking and crafts when there were more articles than ads. I love cooking magazines especially Fine Cooking and the new Food Network magazine. My sister buys all the cooking and decorating magazines so when I go to visit her that is what we do - sit and look through magazines. That is her luxury and she buys them all. LOL My niece gave me a subscription to Chatelaine magazine but I don't care for that one so I usually just pass it along to someone else. I do like Hello Canada and Rayalty but my SIL gives me them after she has read them. At Christmas I may buy a holiday baking magazine for cookies but now I am realizing there isn't much new with cookie recipes these days. They just rehash the old recipes LOL I did used to buy the Collectors magazine but I don't even know if it is around anymore. My Sister always brings me home a Southern Living when she comes home from St. Louis but it is also for sale on our newstands. I like the recipes. I only get the Windsor Star if my sister goes away and has her paper rerouted to me which happens often. The news is old having been on the local television news the night before so it is no great loss if I don't get the paper. If I want really want to look at a particular issue of a magazine I can go to the library and read it. Anne

The only paper I've every really been interested in getting is the Sunday edition. Occasionally I'll subscribe for a while and it goes the same way. They give a great introductory rate then raise the price again and again until it costs more than to buy it at the store. And often the delivery service gets terrible. Now let me be clear - I delivered papers for a while so I know what the job is. IT'S NOT EASY! You get the old bags that have to have the paper in a particular position, facing a particular direction on the particular spot or they'll call and complain that it's wet or not received. The one I put into 15 bags! Nope that wasn't wet, but I digress. Additionally I recently spoke with a carrier and now the carriers have to buy rubber bands and bags for the papers from at least the one company. That stinks. That said, I've had great service but often get bad service. Let's face it, carrying papers isn't something you want to do all your life. It's actually fun for a while but it gets old with the whiners trying to get free papers. But all that said, I enjoyed getting up about 4am on a Sunday, brew a pot of coffee, and look through the paper. I'd look at the headlines, read an article or two that interested me, checked a couple other sections and usually would look at the store flyers and coupons. Now the coupons are few and far between and the flyers are all available online. The paper is free online and I can get the current headlines, not something that's a day old. Most all the feature stories are in there and the big paper here doesn't have a TV log in it - but I always get that online too. The biggest paper here is nearly bankrupt for a lot of reasons. The subscription part is being ignored and they're losing subscribers which means MORE lost revenue since their advertising rates are based a lot on subscriptions. The secondary paper doesn't deliver to my area. I'm on the wrong side of the river for them apparently. I get my news from a variety of sources. I've always believed in doing that. I always shuddered when people only got their news from one source. Sad really. I like different perspectives. But today, the newspaper isn't for getting the "news", as stated repeatedly above, it's for the features, the stories, the entertainment. TV, radio and the internet let you know what's going on within minutes or seconds, papers make you wait sometimes DAYS! But it's the tv logs, the crossword puzzle, the comics, the arts & entertainment section and the like. Even the want ads in the paper are being replaced by other more productive means. Papers have caused many of their own problems. I can't see a lot of these papers lasting. Around here I'd expect the two papers to merge eventually. Actually they already have. What was four papers a few decades ago are down to two. They used to have morning and evening editions, now it's one, the overnight edition. Small town papers used to be fun. I used to subscribe to a couple different ones for various reasons but now they're not independent anymore, they're all part of a big chain that owns a dozen or more of the small town papers and they're carbon copies of each other. Again, you're as well off getting it online. Plus the post office can't deliver a paper in a reasonable time so I don't bother trying to subscribe to the out of town ones anymore. The cost is about the same as the "big town" papers. But I understand and didn't mind, when I would get it. I mourne the loss of local news. I'm saddened to see the destruction of the local papers. But businesses, like people, get greedy and shoot themselves in the foot too often. And what's just as sad is the dissolving of the local newscasts too. They're all dumping reporters, going with more canned stories and are a variation of the national stuff. There's just not much out there anymore for truly local NEWS. The saddest part of it all is this is what people want. Ugh.

Here's an article on best practices for assessing the veracity of news & the sites that promulgate it in our digitally connected age. I realized I've come to use most of these same techniques too, over the years: https://medium.com/@holden/how-media-literacy-gets-web-misinformation-wrong-45aa6323829d "How “News Literacy” Gets Web Misinformation Wrong I have a simple web literacy model. When confronted with a dubious claim: Check for previous fact-checking work Go upstream to the source Read laterally That’s it. There’s a couple admonitions in there to check your emotions and think recursively, but these three things — check previous work, go upstream, read laterally — are the core process. We call these things moves. They are generally usable intermediate goals for the fact-checker, often executed in sequence: if one stops panning out, then you go onto the next one. The reason we present these in sequence in this way is we don’t just want to get students to the truth — we want to get them there as quickly as possible. The three-step process comes from the experience of seeing both myself and others get pulled into a lot of wasteful work — fact-checking claims that have already been extensively fact-checked, investigating meaningless intermediate sources, and wasting time analyzing things from a site that later turns out to be a known hoax site or conspiracy theory site..." And 1 of the first things I check these days is the dateline on an article. I see so much stuff that gets circulated as if new, when it's from years ago. FWIW, HTH