Paying for the Free Press

Wow. That’s all I can say. I just finished doing our taxes and then my son’s FAFSA to qualify for financial aid. And like millions of Americans, I now know for sure that I have no money to send this child to school.

So like President Obama being stared at by John McCain, I’m looking for ways to cut our budget. And two things in particular caught my eye: my public radio membership and my three newspaper subscriptions.

I downgraded my memberhip to WBEZ last year so I don’t donate more than the cost of a cup of mocha at Starbucks each month. And NPR is my daytime buddy. I would feel terrible guilt if I listened without subscribing. (I am Catholic after all.)

But my newspaper subscriptions add up to more. While I read all of those papers, do I really need them all when every penny will count? For right now, the answer is yes.

Newspapers are almost disappearing faster than retail stores. Sure, you can read a lot of the papers online, but it’s just not the same. I bet the small story in our regional paper about a wife committing puppetcide wasn’t online, for example. (As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up.) You also don’t get all of the ads, and while I don’t really have any money to go shopping, I like to keep up with trends. And for every subscription cancelled, the cuts at the papers pile up. Recently, my husband’s friend who was a research librarian at a Chicago daily was let go after years of service. Reporters and editors now have to do their own research. I guess they do this instead of sleeping since I know how much time it takes to do the reporting and writing for a good story.

So something else will have to get rubbed out by my pencil. I still believe we should all pay to protect our free press. It wouldn’t be America without it.