But what to do? I could leave a light on – funny how if someone were up early with a light on, the paper would magically appear by stealth delivery, not by strong-arm pitch from the street. But burning a light bulb all night is a waste of energy.

Come to think of it, it’s even a bigger waste to pay for news content to be printed on trees made into inked paper in a factory and then driven to my front door. The whole production chain from cradle to grave boggles the mind: logging, trucking, milling, printing, home delivery, and even more processing with recycling.

News has been available for a long time in many other formats that do not waste as much energy. I know I’m late to the party breaking this print habit and moving to a digital format. But reading the hard copy paper had become part of my morning routine of rising early before the family chaos and enjoy a good read with a quiet breakfast.

Online print subscription trial

Incredibly, you can’t change your subscription from home delivery to the digital print edition with one move: you have to cancel one by phone and then sign up for the other online. Good grief.

I liked that $15.95 monthly fee would be less than half of the home delivery rate, which had increased 54% from the $21.80 I was paying in 2002. I also liked that I would not be lugging a full blue box to the street every week.  I could have access to all of the different regional versions, archives and premium investor tools.

I hated the online print edition. Here’s why:

1. It’s too small to read and can’t be resized to fit my screen. (And yes, I have a large screen.) I can’t just grab the bottom corner and drag the whole thing bigger, like I can with a zinio digital magazine. The bounding box is irritating, requiring squinting to discern even titles. The zoom function is too labour intensive: even though it makes the text a readable size, as soon as you flip the page, the document returns to the smaller state and has to be zoomed again.  Argh!
2. The sidebar is irritating. While the text becomes a readable size in the sidebar column, it requires a specific grab on the narrow scroll bar to advance the text. I would prefer to scroll down by rolling a trackball anywhere, like I can on any web page. This requirement for spurious accuracy ticks me off.
3. I never got around to exploring any of the regional editions. After persisting with one edition, tiring of the need to zoom and rezoom to read articles of interest, I had invested too much time already.
4. Try as I might with the archives search, I could never find a particular fictional satire piece that ran last fall about Sarah Palin’s descendants that I was hoping to share with a friend.
5. I never used the investor tools – they were nice in theory but I didn’t take them for a spin.

Comparing the online digital version

Side by side, the online digital version was an easier read, albeit with its own drawbacks.  The Globe has correctly determined that the online web site should have an entirely different user interface. There are graphics, icons, titles, menus, a heads-up dashboard menu and thumbnails to click on. Once you select what you want to read, articles are a readable size, not requiring any zooming.

But Flash ads are such a distraction from the content. It’s downright ironic that a content marketer needs revenue from ads that are hell-bent on taking readers’ eyeballs in all directions away from the content.  Most of the Flash ads run in the same location so I can block the screen to avoid them.

Scrolling on the page is easy using a trackball, with the one caveat of needing to avoid rolling over the magnifying glass icons, spry widgets that pop up extra menus with random content someone else has decided is related.

The larger question of content delivery

In terms of news consumption, the question becomes how to still get my fix. Much has been written about the demise of news in print format as the Internet and social media grow exponentially. Content is indeed king, but the question becomes how best to receive that content and at what price. Since joining Twitter last spring, I found I was tapped into lots of news that would be covered on television and radio the same day but found in The Globe and Mail the next day.

Historically, I depended on The Globe and Mail to be my filter for thoughtful, researched journalism and it delivered. Over the last few years however, I have found a shift toward more entertainment fluff and less in-depth pieces as departments have been downsized. For example, all too often a staffer who just happens to be in a foreign location writes the lead Travel article, so it feels like the section has become a wrapper for the travel ads, not an interesting read about travel.

Twitter, RSS feeds and Google Reader have broadened my net for news sources such that I don’t view The Globe and Mail as my main source any longer. It has become one of many places to find news, and moreover, the role of filter has shifted to me.

Bottom line decision

I know someone has to pay journalists to create the stories, conduct the interviews and provide the thoughtful analysis I crave. What would I be willing to pay for? News in a format that delivers timely and insightful content in an accessible format, and doesn’t cost me sleep.

While I admit that I feel like a defector, my decision is to go with the free online version. Flash ads be damned, at least it’s presented in a size I can read. The extra hour of sleep every day is well worth it.