by Francis Jock

Created on: August 18, 2009   Last Updated: May 02, 2012

Every weekend, for the past year or so, my wife takes a small vacation by going to visit her elderly cousins that live in a nearby city. I opt to stay at home, being a country bumpkin and no interest in attending late night card games, going to church and watching movies on the Hallmark Channel. It's a small thing, a couple of days on my own to work on my Honey-Do list of projects that never seems to reach an end. In exchange, she gets to spend quality time with her family, dining out, shopping and doing whatever is on her Honey-Buy list.

In exchange for this, my wife always returns home with a sack of newspapers that one of her cousins has saved for me, at my request, of course. I don't buy or subscribe to any newspapers or magazines either, for that matter. I prefer the on-line convenience of CNN.com or practically any other website that offers news without paper. That's what this article is all about: News without Paper.

The latest bag of newsprint, always from the same city newspaper, by the way, was particularly bulky, weighing in at just under five pounds. That's a lot of cellulose and ink for one week's reading. You might think that there's five pounds of news there, just waiting to be devoured and digested, all at one sitting. Alas, that's just not the case, as newspapers have become mostly a collection of boring advertisements wrapped around a few tidbits of local interest, sports, entertainment sensationalism, the mandatory sheet of comics, horoscopes and crosswords, editorial nonsense, all topped of with a touch of international news from the wire services.

My approach to tackling these ink and cellulose dinosaurs is consistent with tasking out the trash. First, I separate and segregate all the advertisements and inserts. I don't need to read or even browse any of these because I have given up being a consumer and become a strict non-consumer, recycling, reusing and making everything I can without spending a dime on the plethora of poor quality and short-lived products being sold to unsuspecting shoppers these days. Besides, there's news can never be found in the latest sales paper. All together, advertising add-ins comprise about one-third the weight of my weekly news bag.

Having relieved my news bag of the unessential, next I begin skimming the second section of each daily edition. I like to skim, not read, the papers from the back to the front. The back pages of the sports section, which amounts to roughly the second third of the news bag's

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