Newspaper Subscription And My News Addiction

Filed in archive Information about , Online Content on May 10, 2010

© garryknight

I admit it: I'm addicted to news. It's been this way for as long as I can remember...

I was fortunate in the early nineties to have access to unlimited wire service search time on this new little tool my university library had. They called the tool the Internet. Time online was rationed. Undergraduates could use two hours a week. As a graduate student I was entitled four, I think. But my position as a graduate assistant in the library eventually got me pretty much unfettered access to online news resources.

My access fed my addiction. I became fascinated with particular issues - like the Soviet war in Afghanistan (I knew who Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Ahmad Shah Massoud, General Abdul Rashid Dostom, etc. were long before those names got much press coverage).

Today, little has changed - though the Internet is much more accessible. Still, access to the Internet doesn't necessarily mean that I find the news I want online anymore. I spend a lot of time feeding my addiction. And I look for services like newspaper subscription - places I can go to expand what I can read. It takes a lot of digging to find out what's new in Daghestan, the Chin Hill Tracts, Mindanao, or Kurdistan.