Well, so far the move has turned out to be even better than I’d hoped. I hadn’t realized how liberating it would feel to think, “I can generally walk 4 blocks — That means I can walk to the coffee shop, or to the store, or to dinner with friends, or to the public library, or to the river, or….” My world just expanded exponentially.
Even on days when four blocks are far beyond my capacity, I can sit at my kitchen table and watch the town walk by.
Still, part of my plan was missing. I’d intended to start reading the local paper. I’d even filled out the online request form for a subscription a few days before I moved. And yet… no paper. Little did I know, there’s an initiation process. Remember how putting mail on hold works here? Yeah, it’s kind of like that. Here’s how to subscribe to the local paper.
- submit online request (which includes name and address fields… this becomes significant later)
- wait for person to contact you to “complete your order,” wondering all the while what the point of an online subscription form is if there’s no actual mechanism to subscribe online
- wait some more
- resubmit online request with “I don’t need two subscriptions, just one, but I’m worried the first one got lost” in the notes field
- get email from them asking me to call them to complete my request, and confirming my address, which is wrong by one number
- correct the address error via email, so it’s in writing
- call them to set up payment
- RECEIVE NEWSPAPER… and discover that your name is misspelled by one letter
- email them to ask that your name be spelled correctly
- open paper, wondering what level of reporting you’ll find
Luckily, I’m not actually interested in high quality reporting. Luckily, I’m mostly interested in knowing, even at a very basic level, what’s been going on in town. And I’m sure the letters to the editor and the police blotter will become my favorite sections. This week, for example, there was a sink reported to the police — a sink sitting in the middle of an intersection.
Of course, given my interactions to date, it’s possible that someone reported some silk in the road. One letter makes a big difference.
I recently read an interesting commentary on the future of news that pointed out that 70% of a newspaper’s cost is in printing and circulation, 16% is in marketing and advertising, and a whopping 14% in editorial – news gathering, writing, editing, and the like. Sounds like your fail was somewhere in the 86% of the enterprise that has nothing to do with what’s actually in the paper.
Police blotters do indeed rule in smaller communities.