The Japan Times is just too expensive I think.

I just got an email notice about their digital subscription rate changes.

Some thoughts:

(1) I actually haven’t subscribed to the Japan Times for a very long time. I used to be a faithful print subscriber, but they kept on raising their rates. Eventually I switched to the Daily Yomiuri because it was much less expensive and, I thought, more interesting because they had weekly sections from other newspapers, like the Chicago Tribune and others.

(2) Their new rate is like 3 times more expensive than the New York Times and 4 times more expensive than the Washington Post. I just don’t think that’s reasonable.

(3) I stopped my print subscriptions to newspapers after the 3/11/2011 earthquake (coming up on the 10th anniversary for that) because getting the news quickly was important then and I realized that getting day old news wasn’t as informative anymore. It was better to get digital subscriptions I could read on my iPad.

(4) My neighbor who still got print subscriptions would leave them off at my place at the end of the month instead of recycling, so I could use them at the bottom of the bird cage.

(5) I do believe in supporting the news biz. I don’t want to see it die out. So I do subscribe to some things, like the New York Times and the Washington Post. I think I’m going to subscribe to the St. Louis Post/Dispatch. They have a very reasonable $26/year rate and I get all sorts of interesting email notices from them. I think I’ll also make a donation to the Guardian.

(6) For reading news from Japan, each morning I read the NHK News site. It’s free and I can see what’s going on with the state of emergency and so on. You can see today’s headlines in the picture.

(7) I considered subscribing to Apple News+ (anybody here do that?) but there aren’t enough included newspapers I’m interested in. The New York Times doesn’t even appear there anymore. I usually don’t open the app any more to read free articles because most of them are click-bait to sell you a monthly $9.99 subscription.

(8) The digital sites I read regularly are The New York Times, CBS News, USA Today, BBC News, The Washington Post, ABC News, Microsoft News, Yahoo News, AP News, NHK News, HuffPost, NBC News, Google News, NPR News, CNN, and FlipBoard.

How about you?