Two Years Without The Union-Tribune (June 1, 2010)

I WAS once a daily U-T buyer when it was once 50 cents for a daily paper, though it was about half the size of what it once was a decade before that. It was 50 cents up until May of 2008 when the bozo owner of the company decided that paying 50 cents for half of what I was once getting in 1996 wasn't enough money. They raised the price to 75 cents an issue.

That's when I decided to stop buying the U-T and read the same paper on their website.

It was that way until this past fall when the paper's website was reorganized so that you have to pay to see the paper (even for the advertisements).

Pardon me, but why would I want to pay to see advertisements?

Then again, I used to pay 50 cents to see the few advertisements that were in the daily paper. They raised it two years ago because they weren't getting enough businesses to advertise with them due to the recession that started in 2008.

So over the course of the past 104 weeks, I saved $6.50 a week for NOT buying the Union-Tribune. That's $676 that the U-T never got from me in the past two years. Now that's a lot of money saved.

Before the price increase, I used to spend $4.75 a week. Since about 1992 when I started buying the paper, I spent about $247 a year for 16 years, equalling about $4,000. For that much money, I could have bought two new high-end computers at today's prices.

What happened to the U-T has been happening with newspapers all across the country in the past few decades. Back in 1990, we used to have the El Cajon Daily Californian every day, the Escondido Times-Advocate, the Oceanside Blade-Citizen, the San Diego Union (morning), and the Evening Tribune (evening). Ironically, the SDU and the ET were owned by the same company, Copley. There used to also be the San Diego edition of the Los Angeles Tiumes.

Since the 1990s, the ETA and the OBC merged to form the North County Times. The El Cajon Californian is now a small tabloid weekly. The L.A. Times no longer has a San Diego edition. The SDU and ET were folded into one paper. Many weeklies such as one I found in Rancho Santa Fe, I can't recall the name, disappearred. Not sure if there were weeklies still in existance except for the known one from El Cajon.

The fun part of the newspapers was that I once spent a Sunday going from San Diego to El Centro, Yuma, Indio, Palm Springs, Banning, Riverside, San Bernadino, Pasadena, Whittier, Los Angeles (two paper companies), Long Beach, Anaheim, Ocenside, and Escondido collecting Sunday edtions to see what comics they carried, what their TV Week inserts looked like with what channels they listed, and more. I can't really do that anymore with so many Sunday papers priced about $2, compared to $1 back in 1991. Most of all dropped their TV Week inserts. Many cut back on the comics. The price of gas isn't $1.29 a gallon anymore.

Same thing with the TV Guides. I picked up different editions of TV Guide from Yuma, Coachella (since 1997), Los Angeles, and Ventura-Santa Barbara to see what they looked like with their channel lineups and programming. Can't do that anymore since TV Guide dumped all of their editions a few years ago.

On many Sundays in the early 90s, I sometimes drove to the Los Angeles area coming from San Diego or on a rare occasion, Riverside county and arrived at about 7pm to pick up the Orange County Times, Long Beach something, the Los Angeles Times, and maybe some of the other Sunday papers near Los Angeles like Whittier or Pasadena. There's also the Los Angeles Daily News, a longtime competetor of the Los Angeles Times.

There used to be another Los Angeles paper I got until 1989 when it folded called the Herald Examiner. Used to get it by Bob's Big Boy on Navajo Road back in the day.

Too bad for the newspaper. They may exist only on the Internet after this decade ends. Many won't be free either.