This is exactly why I hadn't subscribed in the past: I figured it was pointless, because what I really needed was the gestalt from all the papers.
Boy was that dumb of me. I'm sure I would benefit from having perspectives from the WSJ and NYT to pair with WaPo. But my previous state was having no newspaper at all to rely on, just free sites like (bleh) Slate and (unbelievably bad) cable news web sites like CNN. Adding a single newspaper to that has helped enormously.
And it's not just, or even mostly, about improving my understanding of world affairs. It's that the process I use to bring myself up to speed every day is so much more pleasant than it was before. It's like a version of the blogaverse where everything is reported by professionals. It feels kind of like a miracle.
Like I said: it was worth the money. So much so that I'm kicking myself for not having spent the money before. I would guess I get approximately as much value from the WaPo subscription as I do from Amazon Prime.
>just free sites like (bleh) Slate and (unbelievably bad) cable news web sites like CNN.
I feel genuinely sorry for you. I can't imagine reading that every single day. That's a lot of exposure to, quite frankly, a whole lot of clickbait. Don't NYT and WaPo have a limited amount of free pageviews per day?
Come to think of it, there are millions of people in the world whose primary source of news is social media like Facebook, Twitter (both news from your own circle), and Reddit (probably the worst offender? Clickbait titles generate likes, news that a small majority dislikes gets hidden).
[I had written a rather lengthy bit of text about how that's all a pretty good thing, still. Far better than hearsay and an inability to verify national broadcasting, and let's not forget that HN falls in the above category as well and I enjoy this. But this summary says much the same as the very lengthy text.]
Personally I regularly read the Economist. The additional audio format is nice; completely ad free news and you can speed up the less relevant bits. It focuses on some of the more impactful events in the world, which sometimes gives me just enough time in the week to even read news about Africa. Besides, as it is a weekly, it expands on topics in the way that sometimes I'll not bother reading the dailies when something tragic happened. Preferring to wait until Sunday to have some of the speculation filtered out.
Also a company subscription to NYT, FT, and some less known ones.
I didn't stop at Slate and CNN; they (along with Bloomberg View) were just my only "magazine" format daily reads. Obviously, I read important stories on NYT or WaPo.
But the point isn't that you can read the "important" stuff with a free pageviews. The point is that you can click your bookmark bar link for WaPo and just browse the whole site, which is an entirely different experience than just reading a couple stories from them over the course of the week in the process of drilling into a story that's trending on other sites.
