Pay for that Paper. Please.

Ever since I heard that the Boston Globe might be shut down, I've been thinking about newspapers and the economics thereof. The Globe is hardly the first daily newspaper to face this threat -- hello, Rocky Mountain News and (sort of) Seattle Post-Intelligencer -- but I grew up in New England, and (full disclosure!) my first job after college was as a reporter for a "dead-tree" daily, so it hit me.

The problem, of course, is that putting out a good newspaper doesn't just cost a lot of trees; it costs a lot of money: reporters and bureaus, printing and distribution. And when "everyone" seems to be getting the news online, and free, newspapers are hurting.

In the days of Web 1.0, I remember hearing people talk about how great it would be to create "personalized" papers: you could program a bot to scour the Web for you for stories that were of particular interest to you, whether your passion was NASCAR racing, commodities trading, chocolate recipes, or Ukrainian poetry. You might even create a "community" of Ukrainian poetry fans.

But we're compartmentalized enough already. What great papers do is tell you about the world, and especially about the parts that you think you're not interested in. Every day, I find myself reading stories that I would never have programmed a bot to look for (fish-farming in Iceland, or the closing of a music store in Manhattan -- and I don't even play an instrument!). Every day, stories make me understand viscerally the truth of John Donne's over-quoted line that "no man is an island". And isn't that worth paying for?

So: drop those quarters into the newspaper box. And read.