I got a bill from the Trib...time to renew. Print edition on Sunday and Wednesday delivered by USPS. E-mail edition every morning early am. Print edition old news by the time I get it so it rarely gets read. I called customer service to have the options explained to me as it was very confusing. Found out I don't have to get those two printed papers at all and the difference is $185/year if I cancel the printed papers. Which I did.

This is my public service announcement. :)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/2022 05:42PM by gemini.

    They didn't tell me diddly, they just ran my card through again and then thanked me...

    I didn't know that they were allowed to 'assume' you were going to donate for another year.

    And this is NOT a public service announcement!  It's just me bitching!!

Yeah, the Trib's renewal tactics are not what I would call "transparent". I am signed up for a newsletter from another organization. It is also "auto-renew", which is pretty common these days. But when my subscription came up for renewal (about 2 weeks ago, so fresh in my mind), I got two emails from them telling me that I was about to be auto-renewed, and they provided a link to cancel the renewal If I so chose.

They got an A for transparency. It is nice to feel like you are not being hustled.

SLTrib, Salt Lake Film Society, and John Dehlin are all in the B to C range.

It is expensive and energy-intensive to cut down trees in Canada, grind them up into paper, print carbon-laced ink on it, and truck it to your house. What is really being transmitted is just information, and the computer does a far better job of it than paper does.

And the ink doesn't rub off on your fingers, nor do papers stack up on the table.

I grew up with two papers a day at home. I get it. The feel and even the smell triggers a bit of nostalgia. I thought for years that the physical paper was "better" in some sense. I have changed my mind.

I got a subscription to the NYTimes about 20 years ago. I would flip through the daily email outlining the contents of the day, open a tab on articles that seemed interesting. When I looked at the full article, there were links to previous articles on the same or related topics, if I needed a refresher on the background.

I few years later I worked at a company that had a physical subscription to NYT. I discovered two things - I preferred the electronic version, I had never trained myself to like the print version of the NYT better than the electronic version, and when finally give the opportunity, I was not impressed. Those long "magazine" pieces in the Times are downright intimidating on paper. Some of them fill two entire newspaper pages, which are big. In the electronic version, you don't get to see how huge the article is. I have read articles in the electronic version that I likely would have skipped in print. That is a mixed blessing, to be sure.

I get three electronic papers for less than what I used to pay for one print newspaper. Like I said, grinding up trees is expensive. Yeah, I do miss the comics, but not enough to seek them out individually, which I could do if I really wanted to.

Go electronic. You will learn to love it.

I kinda lost interest in the Trib after my friend Robert Kirby retired. I don't even subscribe to our local rag here. Just check the online obits every day....lol.