... which is one of the strengths of newspaper journalism! CNN, Fox etc. (both t.v. & online) have this mad obsession with serving up "up-to-date, latest developments" that half of what they report gets contradicted half an hour later anyway. They throw out semi-speculation in the hope they'll "get it right" ahead of other stations but in the end it's just noise. Newspapers can have this problem too, because they're coming up to a deadline, but usually they err on the side of caution and only include what's known to be true. The other good side effect of the deadline is that a certain amount of reflection can be included. You get a sense that it's the "bigger picture". T.V. and the internet just trips over itself with minute-by-minute updates.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes you need to be in the known, like the Olympics 2016 voting (I followed the BBC blog for that) but more often than not I enjoy the distance papers put between the news item and the reader.

Another underrated advantage of the newspaper is the medium itself. Sure, it's awkward flicking through the pages of a broadsheet on a bus but there's big, high-quality photographs and an eye-friendly column size. Too often websites make columns too wide, resulting in eye-strain no matter what way you resize your browser. And please don't tell me a news photograph on your TFT looks as good as in print- if it does you must be a graphic designer with a 2,000$ screen. Besides, we spend most of our lives in front of screens anyway, do I really have to get my news off one?

You North Americans don't know how lucky you have it.
When I was in the U.S. on holidays I was amazed by the huge number of satellite stations the rental car had on offer. It was playoff time in the NBA and I spent many a 5+ hour car trip continuously listening to live basketball in excellent quality, no need to worry about tuning when getting out of range like with AM/FM etc.

There's just nothing like that here in Ireland! Then again, we have close to no live basketball here at all - the t.v. official rights holder decides to show one game A WEEK. Having FTA triple headers in HD at playoff time like you do is the stuff of dreams here :(

I have a suspicion that for you it will be like the old saying- you don't know what you have until you lose it!

Ok, I will admit U.S. papers tend to be fairly awful. Here's an (incomplete) list of good papers available in my neck of the woods (Ireland) that meet these criteria:

Die Welt
International Herald Tribune
Financial Times (U.K. weekend edition)
Die Zeit
Tokyo Times (international edition)
Frankfurter Rundschau
Suedeutsche Zeitung

I'm sure there's more, unfortunately I'm only fluent in English & German so that restricts my selection a bit. Hope that helps ;)

I care about my newspapers a lot and would really hate it if they went away. I think they definitely bring something else to the table in terms of news and certain papers are consistently of higher standard than ALL web news outlets because of their indepth reporting, (relatively) unbiased opinion and greater, more sensible appreciation of the bigger picture.

However I don't care about winning over any of you /.ers with this argument- life's too short for that. There is one angle that I can take on this which everyone here will understand: Even if newspapers were just what you get online in paper form, I'd still buy them any day over reading the same stuff online.

Why? Simple- I spend too much time already (in my job) staring at a screen, paper's a refreshing and healthy way of getting the news when you're sick of the TFT.


Full disclosure: I'm 21, so don't give me the he's-stuck-in-his-old-ways argument ;)