My Insight: You Must Be Nuts

The Times-Dispatch wants me to pay an extra $1 week on my subscription to get a special section they've invented called Insight: An In-Depth Look at Our World. That's $52 a year. I can get a high-class weekly magazine subscription for that amount. If you don't ordinarily get the Saturday paper, it's $2 extra per week ($104 a year!!), and if you want it mailed, it's $3 a week ($156 a year!!!! You can get two or three really great magazines for that amount, and they're easier to carry on the bus or read in the bathroom.)

What does Insight have going for it? Nothing! There's no local stories. It's all features pulled out of Los Angeles or Chicago Tribune syndicate packages. They all have the same size headline, so the section has the monotonous look of an advertising section. This week's sample edition had no ads in it, which makes me suspect that the commercials for goods and services may be subtlely embedded in the stories, like the American Idol judges sitting in front of their bright red Coca-Cola cups. The stories that looked suspicious to me this week were one about dental implants and another about acai berries, which are used in a new liquor called Veev, and yet are healthy or wonderful in some way.

This week will be the last time I look at this section, and now I have to do battle with the subscription department again to get out of the weekend package of Friday-Saturday-Sunday so I'm not paying $52 extra a year for this piece of worthlessness. I would much rather sustain my subscription to The New Yorker, and I even decided to give Rolling Stone a try again now that they're resizing themselves to traditional magazine-size.