I need a paper newspaper in order to be happy eating breakfast. Take that as a given in this problem. I've been getting the New York Times, and aside from a few glitches delivery is very consistent, but pricey at $50/month. But I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the discrepency between the qualities that we all want to see in our "paper of record" and the reality (assorted scandals, cowardly political stance, lack of transparency; the fact that, in any article in which I know any details independently, the Times is often meaningfully incomplete or wrong). The naked elephant is that we are forced by our need to have a "paper of record" to pretend that these problems don't exist.

So I impulsively canceled the Times recently, prompted immediately by disgust over their unexplained one-year delay in printing the NSA spying store, but foundationally by my desire to try other papers.

The Washington Post has had a better record politically— you can read that as matching my personal biases, or as refusing to submit to political pressure and reporting important news as needed on a news bases— but I can't get it on paper here in San Diego. I am doing a free trial of the electronic edition, which is access to a PDF-style image of each page, but it's not satisfactory. Even the biggest size is uncomfortably small, it's slow, and the email announcing it's available usually comes after noon.

The San Diego Union Tribune is a lower-quality regional paper. It runs a lot of wire stories, has shoddy local reporting, a history of incompetent family management, and a strong pro-military, jingoistic bias. It's not an option.

The last option would seem to be the LA Times. But they recently fired Michael Kinsley, who despite a tendency to silliness had a correctly placed heart. To wit, his failed Wiki experiment at least demonstrated his understanding that, in the world of the internet, newspapers will have a role closer to that of trusted arbiter than to news-gatherer. The new guy is a cipher, and they fired a number of long-term quality Op-Ed columnists and brought in some jokers. The A section is usually 30+ pages long, but most of those pages have either one-eight-page bit of editorial content or a full-page ad. Seriously. That's not an exaggeration.

The LA Weekly frequently has better local and statewide journalism than the LA Times, and always has better cultural material, and used to have my favorite movie critic (Mahnola Dargis, who jumped to the LA Times and then to the NY Times, where she is now), but is a weekly, not a daily. The SD Reader is usually two to three pages of halfway readable editorial content and then a few semi-literate features and columnists, reprints, and hundreds of ads for plastic surgery. The only thing I like about it is the reviews of churches, complete with four-star system and breakdown of sermon, liturgy, snacks, architecture, etc.

So I'm stuck. Probably I'll just go crawling back to the NY Times for my dead tree fix, but I won't like it.