When did you start reading newspapers?

And Wild About Animals for everything else. Especially the free badges.

I stopped reading the papers through my late teens and early 20s and only really started again in my 30s. But these days, it's a weekly thing rather than a daily. I love that weekend ritual of it all.

The Guardian (the REAL paper)
NY Times (proper paper)
The local paper for Norwalk (not real news but good for tv listings and classified ads)

Plus, I always used to read the papers at school by the time I was a teenager. God, the Times-Union, what a rag.

I think reading Bunty trained me not to mind having inky fingers.

rumpie, your post has made my day. now, if you told me it was a her4ld they were reading, i'd be the happiest man alive :)

x-post: nath, and those like her who don't read newspapers: why not? what might make you buy one? this is a very, very important question to me right now.

Now I don't work for one, I can see things better from a reader's perspective. What makes me pick up a paper I wouldn't normally read is if they tell me in bold letters that someone super-smart has written something for them that day. That's usually enough for me.

The internet might be hitting newspaper sales, but papers withdrawing content from their online editions isn't going to win them back sales. It's the *whole* internet that's the problem, not sneaky ex-readers of the Guardian now reading it all online instead.

My parents never got a daily paper. They'd often pick up ones on the train and bring them back and we got the Sunday Times at the weekend. I think I started out reading the sci-tech Innovations page when I was, I dunno, 10 or 11? And the Innovations catalogue insert, come to think of it. I remember going on holiday when I was 13 and finding the Telegraph and Mail good reads.

We had all the broadsheets in our school common room and library and I guess by 16 I was a fairly regular Guardian reader.

yeah -- i never read the indy any more now they're charging.

The Record took a massive downturn in quality when I was in my teens and we stopped getting it then. When I was at school I used to read the Telegraph and the Mail (I was at boarding school and those were the best of the daily papers we had lying around as far as I can remember).

These days, it's the Metro on the way into work, bbc.co.uk and the Guardian online, Teletext and actual real newspaper purchases at the weekend (Guardian on Saturday, Observer and Sunday Mail (not the Mail on Sunday) on a Sunday, unless one of the other papers is giving away a free book/movie that I want).

around age 14 discovered my parents Sunday New York Times

age 19 subscribed to The Village Voice and also started looking at The Wall Street Journal

moving to NYC at 23 began a two newspaper a day habit, Times plus a tabloid Daily News or the late lamented New York Newsday(where I wrote freelance)fuck a New York Post

thanks to the intanet now I look at The Washington Post and The Guardian online along with hard copies of NYT & WSJ.

(xpost to Madchen)

I didn't start really reading a paper (apart from the rubbish local one) until I persauded my parents to start getting The Guardian, when I was about 17.

yes, absolutely. and not just the net: 24-hour TV news, headlines to yr mobile, etc etc etc.

at the moment, newspapers are running around panicking about plummeting sales, but they're still working to a 20th-century model. people no longer need papers to find out what's going on: as henry and others point out, they've got thousands of other news sources to do that.

where papers can carve out a proper niche is in terms of offering an intelligent, informed, reasoned, well-written and well-edited take on what's happening; the calm, if you like, after the storm of information that happens during and immediately after each event. personally, i believe the days of enormous sales are over; that newspapers need to reposition themselves not as essentials (which most hacks still believe they are) but as "luxury" purchases, if you like, for people who want to know more about what's going on.

i'm going to stop now before i start giving away too much. alba: we should go for a drink soon, because i would like to discuss this with you in a lot more detail.

apologies in advance to the glasgow posse if stet and i derail friday night with this :)

Mind you, I've got ILX for that. Erm, anyway, yes, Grimly OTM. Derail all you like, mate.

[remembers how litigious DCT are]

[gets back to work]

i'm still greatly fascinated by my first (mis)reading of the above statement :)

oh. okey. i think i started reading the newspapers about the time i was about to go to the secondary school. which was when i was 13 or 14. or thereabouts.

I can't bear newspaper websites, actually. They're all pish, apart from the film listings serach on the Guardian, which is hardly a newspaper function.

Can we bring newsweeklies into this? Read Newsweek every week from just after the Kuwait invasion in mid-late 1990 until heading off to university after Summer 1994.

I ask because I was watching a BBC2 thing about scandals which had a bit about the Jonestown Massacre on it last night. And I can recall quite clearly that when it happened, my mother cut out all the stories about it in the paper about it, because she didn't want her kids exposed to it. I didn't find out what had happened until ages later. I wonder why that particularly story.

Doing some low key research - are there any good free alternatives to newspapers.com out there? (or even a way to get cheaper membership at newspapers.com?)