New Year, New Paper

Well, so far this year is not shaping up to be a great one. We have been loyal subscribers of the Washington Times since we moved here. I love this paper! It presents so much more of a balanced viewpoint than the Washington Post, which is simply the mouthpiece of the Democractic party. I've always said that you could not pay me enough to get me to subscribe to the Post. I thoroughly enjoy reading the paper each morning.

A few months ago, the Times stopped delivering on Saturdays. It still published a paper, but it was only available online. I don't need more things to do on the computer, so I rarely read it there. Besides, Saturdays are made for relaxing with the paper, not staring at a computer screen!

Then several weeks ago there were suddenly no comics. Now, the Times never did have a great comic selection. I've read enough about the politics of the comic industry to know that only one paper in a town can have the rights to a syndicated comic strip, and sometimes a paper will buy up the rights even if they are not planning on ever publishing a strip, just so that a rival paper can't buy the rights. Sounds like the Post, which does publish several pages of comics each day. But anyhow, we wondered where the comics had gone, and we just figured it was too expensive to pay the syndication fee for any of them.

But then the week after Christmas, the Times announced that they were REALLY cutting back. They were only going to publish 2 sections of the paper, focusing only on international, national, and local news. No sports or anything extra. And no more print Sunday paper either. Just the online one. I'm so down! The boys are too--no sports! I enjoyed their sports sections because they had several good writers who had interesting human interest stories, as well as I just like to keep current, even in the sports world. I will really miss reading the movie reviews and the short blurbs about famous people. Even though I never watch movies, by reading the reviews, I could still converse intelligently with people who were only talking about movies.

I guess what is most depressing is that I can totally see the handwriting on the wall. Pretty soon there is not going to be ANY print Washington Times. Bob is already questioning the value of continuing to pay for our subscription, and I'm sure there are others who will too. Sigh. So the year is just starting off badly. The country is being pulled off a cliff, and now my paper is going away. Depressing.