I Join the Trend: No Local Paper at our House

Newspaper circulation has declined, and I imagine my story isn't atypical. Our house was getting so burned out on the grizzly death-and-murder formula of the Sun-Times, we found about half the days we weren't even taking it out of its wrapper. Just as I was considering cancelling it for basically being worthless, it stopped arriving in the morning. Come to think of it, I couldn't remember paying a bill lately for it. I imagine I put it on the side of the table and never quite got around to it. The other day I bought a Tribune on the stand and remarked to a colleague that I might subscribe to it now that it had been reformatted and gotten small enough so that reading it would not be a whole day's work. She told me that if you subscribe, they still drop off a large-sized edition. So much for that idea. No one called from the Sun-Times to look for my renewal and I didn't bother looking for the bill.

So, for the first time since I was 20 years old, I am not subscribing to a local paper. While I feel out of the loop, there wasn't much loop left in the paper at all, so I imagine we will try this for a while. But it really feels strange.