Printed newspaper are crap. The news in them is old, you still get entire multipage sections that you don't want, they use up trees and gasoline, they crowd your mailbox and you have to dispose of them after reading them. And they cost money! News should be read on-line, preferably with an RSS reader. (I use Google's).
Now, here's something for my Swedish readers. The country's main newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, currently don't offer a finely sorted selection of thematic RSS feeds. If I want the main international news headings from them, then I have to put up with a load of pointless sports stories and local murder cases as well.
However, our friends on the front side of the country, Göteborgs-Posten, have a set of sorted feeds. And that's where my ad hits go these days.
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I use Snarfer, which is a great utility. I guess the RSS-utility used doesn't mean much but the sites/feeds do. My best tip is to establish a search in google news based on your favorite categories and save that as an RSS-feed. Personally, I love it.
Here in the U.S., where all the newspapers are rapidly going bankrupt and disappearing, the print world seems to be dying, as far as using paper goes. The editors complain that nobody PAYS for the stuff we read online. Perhaps they could set up a system similar to what we have for music, where we would pay a very minimal amount for just the stories we're interested in. It ought to be extremely minimal, though. Here we pay just under one dollar for one song, on average. I wouldn't want to pay one dollar for every article. But, say, one quarter for one article might be a possibility. Hm, maybe ten cents. No, they aren't worth that much. I take that back. Five cents is more like it. Anyway, then, if I didn't have to read all the sports trivia or all those murder files, or all the stories about local city council once again deciding what size garbage can shall be set on what place on the curbside on what day of the week, I might be persuaded to pay for news. The news organizations might survive that way. Two or three of them anyway.
I agree that newspaper is wastefulâespecially the sports section that I don't read, and the transportation cost to deliver it to our mailbox is horrifying. However, sitting at a computer to read the daily news is not a communal activity. It is much more interesting and thought-provoking to read the morning newspaper at breakfast with my partner. He reads one section and I read anotherâwe bring each others' attention to interesting articles and we talk about what we are reading. The same goes for reading the Chronicle of Higher Education in the break room at work. We profs can talk to one another, which is very different from reading it online alone at home.
I guess the on-line equivalent is to blog about news stories that interest you, and then people chime in with comments.