 |
| Curious about the huge wad of flyers and advertising in the local weekly freebie newspaper, I brought out the scales. The paper and flyers combined weighed two pounds. |
 |
| Extract the flyers, and the paper itself (which also contained several full pages of advertising), weighed four ounces. |
 |
| The Vancouver Sun on its own weighed seven ounces. With flyers, it weighed 11. |
For years, John and I took The Vancouver Sun, the Province and the Globe and Mail newspapers every day. The Vancouver Courier, a local freebie, would also land on our doorstep twice a week. That was a lot of newsprint in the recycling box every week.
The Internet happened, retirement happened, newspaper cutbacks happened, and until recently, we have just been subscribing online. Our only print papers were the Saturday edition of The Sun and the Courier, now down to once a week.
When I got a call from The Sun recently offering six months of daily newsprint editions as a "courtesy," I accepted, and so once again, there is a Vancouver Sun at our door every morning. Except. There is a newspaper, often quite thin (see cuts, above) and a second wad of flyers and advertising, sometimes nearly as big. And when the Courier lands every week, its few thin pages are wrapped around an inch or so of flyers.
Struck by their heft this early in the Christmas advertising onslaught, I weighed them all one recent morning. The Sun alone weighed 7 ounces. With flyers, it weighed 11. The Courier alone weighed 4 ounces. With flyers, it weighed 32 ounces (two pounds).
Ah, newspapers. Once a source of news and entertainment. Now wrappers for advertising.
 |
| The Sun, the Courier and all their flyers -- this is the wad of material that landed on our doorstep one morning. |
When there was that long newspaper strike with the Times-Colonist in Victoria, the flyer people migrated to the free local newspapers and never went back. As you know, online just doesn't cut it for me. I will allow myself to indulge in a print newspaper until their demise. The one downside to our time in France is that they really don't go in for the general interest newspapers we have or the UK has. Le Monde and Le Figaro don't really even contain much news...just intellectual arguments about events in the news. If you are of a certain class, you need to display at least one prominently on your coffee table. I'm not sure how many people actually read them. But they serve a purpose to indicate that you are an educated thinking person. There are some local newspapers like in the south the Var-Matin but they tend to be very local and much more like our local freebies.
ReplyDelete