I’ve been slow getting through my current book. It’s not a great book, as I’ll explain when I finish it. But the real delay is that I started getting the Wall Street Journal in print form. Why? I traded in some airline miles on an airline I never fly anymore, so no cash cost for the introductory subscription. Early impressions:
- Two newspapers, even skimming, is too much. (We also get the Chronicle.)
- Since I’m reading the Journal for the writing, not for the market minutaie, I’d prefer to not receive the Money section each day.
- The Journal is physically bigger, to a surprising degree. I had imagined that all broadsheet newspapers were using the same size paper. Wrong. The Journal is a few inches larger than the Chronicle in both dimensions.
- While I enjoy reading text on paper, and the disposability of that paper (well, recyclability), I find it annoying to flip through all the material I don’t want to read.
- The “jump” drives me batty. Reading the beginning of an article on one page and then physically moving through the newspaper to the conclusion is maddening. I’m a “pick it up and read it straight through” type of person. I start magazines at the front and go all the way through to the back. I don’t skip straight to the article I know I’ll like. With the “jump” I have to hold several stories in my head at once, since I read/skim the entire front page before flipping through to the details. In computer terms, I guess I’m not a ‘multiple clipboard’ kind of guy.
- I really only care about reading 1-4 articles/day in the Journal. Maybe it’s time to stick with online-only for that reason.