I haven’t subscribed to a printed newspaper in over two decades. Our local newspaper used to be pretty good, and it even came in a morning and evening editions. But then the internet. The local paper shrunk to once a day and then it kept shrinking. Probably like most smaller towns, our newspaper morphed into a business with only a few actual employees who chase a few local stories each day with the rest of the content being from a syndicate. I dropped it ending my lifetime of reading the daily news printed on actual paper.

In its wake I have subscribed at one time or another to the WSJ, NYT, and Washington Post - all online, no printed paper. I quit all of them when America lost its collective mind and became a news bum, reading whatever I could scrounge online without paying a fee. And let me tell you, it’s all bad. But lately the need for these “news” organizations to make a dollar has placed most decent content behind annoying paywalls. I say “death” to those web developers who invented the pop-over, under, and float over advertisements.

Concluding that I would like to read news without web interruptions, I have subscribed again to the New York Times. The printed paper version that is delivered to my door seven days a week. It’s a delight! The user experience is at least a hundred times better than reading online and The Gray Lady content is about as good as it gets.

According to Wikipedia:

As of August 2025, The New York Times had 11.88 million total and 11.3 million online subscribers, both the highest numbers for any newspaper in the United States by a significant margin; the total also included 580,000 print subscribers.

And I’m one of those 580,000 print subscribers!

Sitting down with a cup of coffee and an actual newspaper is an incomparable 20th century delight that simply must be experienced to be appreciated. And bonus, I do this once each day, in the morning. Then I put the newspaper down and forget about it. I’m not being constantly fed breaking “news” updates every time someone named Kardashian passes gas. It’s a superior experience in every way possible.

Printed paper. Hmmm. Perhaps I tossed the old QSL card under the bus too quickly? Maybe it’s time to dump LoTW for printed QSL cards again…