Many magazines and newspapers have online versions. For example, we get the New York Times delivered to my office. I like to browse the paper when I'm eating lunch, but I also get the online version which is free and has most of the stories in which I am interested. I haven't done a study to find how mush of the paper isn't on line, but I know that a whole lot of it is and you can even search for past articles. You can even subscribe to a book review that comes weekly or more often. Newspapers have been experiencing a drop in readership which means a drop in paid subscriptions or people buying a single copy. I think that you can subscribe to online versions of most major newspapers and many minor ones, all for free. It is not surprising to me that many of us choose to get our information on the internet these days. It's simple to do and there is information on any subject you can think about. In fact there is sometimes too much information and you can not always be confident that it is accurate. I suppose that can also be said of print media, but at least in that case, you know the source since all of those that I have seen put their name right smack dab on the front of the publication. On the internet everyone can be an expert and I have to say, there are a lot of wacky folks running around out there. But if you are careful about your source, you can find just about anything on the world wide web.
So I've carried on for two whole paragraphs; what will I do about all of those magazines? If I'm honest with myself, I will acknowledge that I usually don't read any of them completely. There are maybe a couple of articles that I read at most, in each. Not enough to justify the mailman lugging them all here and then me lugging them all out for recycling. At least I don't have to do anything. Since I haven't signed up for automatic renewal [ I hope I haven't done that], I'll just have to deal with the renewal notices that I'll receive for the rest of my life.
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Yes, I get all my news and even read my magazines online. My Uncle Bill, god rest his soul, had enough magazine subscriptions for half of the US. He wouldn't throw anything away and would stack them up by his favorite chair. We used to refer to it as the fortress. My mother finally made him get rid of them and narrow his magazines down. I guess if nothing else you could build forts with yours.
The only ones I can currently build a fort with are the train magazines. When I was into the hobby full tilt, I believed that I would have a nice library of reference material, but I hardly ever looked at them again. As for the others, I first decided that I would keep no more than a year's worth. Same thing happened - I rarely looked at them twice. Then I decided to get rid of the previous issue when I got the new one. For all that you pay for them, there seems to be an awful lot of ads in them. That seems to be getting to be the case more so with newspapers too. I am beginning to see the wisdom and thrift of getting information and doing more and more things with my computer. I really don't understand how some of these companies make so much money when they give you so much for free. Like Google. For most things they don't charge you and yet somehow they make billions.
I don't know if you ever heard about our collection of National Geographic magazines. Well, I'll tell you about them. We had a complete collection of every monthly issue from 1947. Now there was a collection with which to build a fort. My Grandfather actually had them from 1901 or whenever it was they started publishing. Anyway, my parents had these magazines and I really used them for school work through high school and I read some of the articles each month which were really good. I looked forward to getting every new issue.
For a long time they sat in boxes in our attic and then on shelves, but it was hard to keep them upright and looking neat, so, at great cost and expense, I bought these red cases that held six issues apiece. Now my collection not only looked better on the shelves in the downstairs hallway, but they didn't flop all over the place.
The age of the computer dawned and eventually, National geographic came out with all the magazine back issues on disks. So I said, "Aha, this is the way to save space in our home. We can get rid of all the back issues while continuing to get the new ones, but we won't have to save the new ones because there will be updated disks. Well, the quality of the disks left a little to be desired and then it turned out that there weren't going to be any updates because National Geographic and the photographers and writers didn't see eye to eye on the payment of royalties for this new media. It wasn't so easy getting rid of the back issues either. I couldn't bear to put them out for the trash and we eventually gave them, red boxes and all, to our neighbor. The yellow magazines still kept coming until I began to lose interest and eventually we cancelled my membership in the National Geographic Society. Since my name is the same as my father's and since he lived with us, I just continued the membership in the same name after he died and my card said, "Member since 1947." I must have been a scholarly kid.
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