Trying To Cancel My Subscription to the NY Times

(reading time less than two minutes)

I gave my wife a Christmas present this year that will save us money and help save the environment:  we are now a two-iPad house.  Which means that, after decades as a print subscriber, I was able this morning to cancel our subscription to the New York Times.  

Though we’re stopping home delivery seven days a week, we are converting to “all digital access”.  Or at least that was the plan.  But the math just doesn’t add up.

Home delivery of the Times, seven days a week, costs $600+ year.  Each paper comes wrapped in a plastic bag (two or three bags in bad weather) and generates hundreds of pounds of recycling each year which must be carted away.

The “all digital” subscription costs $420 a year for full access to the paper on the web, iPhone and iPad.  Same great news, no paper and no recycling.

But here’s where the math gets interesting:  for $265 a year I can get all of that digital access 24x7 plus home delivery of the Sunday paper.  Huh?

“We’re still a newspaper and always will be a newspaper,” the NY Times lady tells me on the phone.  “We still want you as a subscriber with home delivery.”

Oh, really?  

What they actually want is to be able to tell advertisers that they’re delivering their circulars to me in my coveted 06820 zip code, at least once a week, even if I don’t read them.  (Blessedly, the Times’ apps for iPhone and iPad deliver fewer, less intrusive ads.)  

So now we’ll both be reading our ‘paper’ on iPads and just have three pounds of their newsprint coming to our door each week instead of 20. 

But we still get two other daily papers (Stamford Advocate and Norwalk Hour) and two weekly papers (Darien Times and Darien News), so the pulp and paper industry has nothing to fear.