Share the News

I will start out this post saying "Everyone's looking for ways to save money these days". Well, that is kind of a cliche. I can't recall an era when you didn't hear variations on that statement or things like "In these tough economic times....". But this is a post on how to save money.

For a while now, we have been sharing the newspaper expense with a neighbor. She reads it first, then we read it. So we end up paying half as much for a newspaper. I could imagine if we made an effort, it could be shared with one or two more neighbors, and then we only end up paying 1/4 as much for a subscription. But then the chances of problems with the whole thing go up (i.e. a bad actor who hots the paper and never shares, or always spills food on it). I googled the idea of newspaper sharing, and didn't find much. This article describes doing it in a professional environment.

In a moderately busy urban environment, you probably would not even need to pay for a paper at all, if you don't mind dropping by at coffe shop or some such place in the afternoon and vulching one that has been discarded, read, in a pile somewhere near the entrance. This is the time at which morning newspapers have become as stale as 3-day-old doughnuts.

Of course, if everyone did this a lot, the fortunes of the beleaguered newspaper industry would be even bleaker than they already are. But on the other hand, there are free newspapers ewspapers out there that can be as interesting as the paid ones. These free ones are often as good or better at investigative reporting as the "paid subscription dailies" are. Many point out that newspapers are necessary to hold public officials accountable. It was big city daily newspapers that exposed the scandals of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. This article presents that point of view.

But newspapers can also protect those in power, or block investigation. I've read that the New York Times had an editorial policy of refusing to run certain news stories last year because they might have hurt candidate Barack Obama's Presidential campaign. And blogs and such are becoming more important, too. It's not the newspapers who have been getting us information on what is going on in Iran, but instead it is Iranians using Twitter. And John Edwards is an example of a corrupt politician who was exposed not by a traditional daily newspaper. The investigators at the lowly National Enquirer did this.

Does anyone else share newspapers, or do anything like this? Do some of you not bother with newspapers at all?