What I Read in the Sunday Paper

Jen and I have subscribed to a Sunday paper as long as I can remember. In Chicago, it was the Chicago Tribune, here in Minnesota on the west side of Highway 280, it’s the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Leisurely reading the paper over doughnuts and coffee is a tradition I’m quite fond of.

In an effort to determine what I’m getting in return for my $1.25 per week, I offer the following list of what I paid attention to this Sunday, July 31, 2005:

  • Money & Business; paged through, nothing interesting. Ironically, I’ve found it less compelling since they added Wall Street Journal articles.
  • Variety; Only read horoscope – predicts a decent day. For sure, I’m having powered doughnuts for breakfast.
  • Arts & Entertainment; Fringe Festival starts this week. Right, I added the Fringe Fest podcast to PodcastMN
  • Metro; paged through, nothing interesting
  • Comics; Opus, Get Fuzzy, Doonesbury. Looks like all the comics are larger this week. They probably pulled a couple and didn’t replace them.
  • Opinion; The headline said it was going to compare Minneapolis and Vancouver, cool. It didn’t (double checked to make sure I wasn’t in the Travel section). Paged through, nothing else seemed competent.
  • Best Buy weekly ad; Nice price on a 300GB hard drive
  • Circuit City weekly ad; Nice price on a 1GB SD card.
  • CompUSA weekly ad; Nice prices on USB flash drives
  • Office Depot weekly ad; Color laser printers are falling in price nicely.

I actually feel pretty good about the time paging through the weekly flyers. The newsprint, on the other hand, left me unfulfilled (could also be the doughnuts). Nearly all the newspaper articles I’ve read in the past year left me wondering a) where’s the story? or b) where’s the editor?

Did I get $1.25 worth. For sure, and I’ve easily ignored 50% of the paper – and most of the locally written articles. I’m even cool advertisers subsidizing the remaining costs. I make a commitment each Sunday morning to this local paper, it’d be nice if I got more out of it than hitting refresh on my RSS reader.