The demise of Newspapers

luscious_purple found this important but long article in The New Republic.

I'm fond of our local newspaper, The Bergen Record. It covers our corner of NJ, which is not always served by NYC media (such a wide area to cover) or The Star Ledger, which actually concentrates more on Central/Southern NJ. (I used to get it when I lived in Roselle Park in Union County - 45 minutes south of me).

We get it 7x days a week, but only pay for the Thursday-Sunday subscription we orginally had. (Despite the comment in the TNR article, offering a weekend only subscription isn't a weakness, just that some people don't have time to read during the week, especially something like the NY Times). I think they added the 3 free days to boost circulation numbers.

In the past 18 months, the parent started a free weekly local newspaper for our town, called "The Little Ferry Local". Not sure why they call it that, except that our town's quarterly government published newsletter is called "The Little Ferry Express". No, it's not online (a drawback, as last year Alan's picture was in the paper several times - they liked to cover his pre-k class, I would have shared the photos). The content is shared and duplicated between 3 local adjacent towns as well as borrowed from the main paper. I don't mind that there is news about the adjacent towns (our town goes to the high school of one of them) - but they do get somewhat lax in cross-editing - they forget to put the towns with the elementary schools which have generic names like Grant, Washington, Memorial etc and may be duplicated, so if you don't know which school goes with which town it may be confusing.

Anyway, the TNR article fears that without the watchdog function of the newspaper and it's own indepedent reporting (as well as the rivarly in a 2 newspaper town) - things may slip between the cracks. A very good point indeed.

Ok

Somone just left *5* comments on my blog annoymously in Japanese (the first one has some english)???

(I have them screened for now)

Healthcare gripe

I just refilled a prescription by mail order. My company switched plans as of January 1st and the cost for a 3 month refill went from 70.00 to 100.00 - it would be 50.00 if I filled it in store for a one month supply. Fortunately this isn't an essential medicine and I will look into an alternative or stop taking it. At least my 2 most essential medicines aren't that bad - the one I won't mail order is 10.00 a month, and the other one is 60.00 for a 3 month supply. (I won't mail order my thyroid medicine as it is heat sensitive and I don't want it shipped in the hot summer with no airconditioning).

Meanwhile I needed to get one of those explaination of benefits forms to submit to the flexible spending account for reimbursement. I figured I could go online, view the form and print it. Our provider doesn't have that, you have to call and allow 7-10 days processing time to get it! (I guess they can't just print, put in an envelope and mail or just fax it?) And they only bother to automatically mail the forms if there was anything other than a copay on it (probably to save money).

I guess we get what we pay for with the healthcare benefits - they switched from a provider that did all for us (medical,dental,flexible spending and vision) to individual ones for each area to save money (and I have no idea what the cost breakdowns were). At least it is better than their horrible experiement with being self insured where we had the worlds worst healthcare paperworking processing company ever with the worst website, couldn't even track claims until they got paid - couldn't even tell if they were received without calling them.

Links of interest

while waiting yet again for that bug to be fixed

Facebook advice for parents (from a Stanford professor)

Low Tech Fixes for a High Tech World via the NY Times