A couple weeks ago I was having a discussion with my father about the lack of a future for deadwood newspapers. I was optimistic, he was grumpy. Then I sat down to read my deadwood newspaper and thought: You're doing it wrong. If I was going to advocate the Web as the best source of news, I had to use it that way too.

So I changed my homepage on my browser and started reading the Tagesspiegel online. And I started feeding Handelsblatt's tweets into my tweetdeck (a main source of leads). Unfortunately, I couldn't add Financial Times Deutschland and Platow Brief because, alas, they are not so progressive. I discovered that I read as much -- if not more -- of my daily paper this way (with the exception of the Sunday section) and even get immediate reaction from other readers in the comments section (sometimes nice to get perspective, sometimes not so nice).

I then turned off my adblocker plugin on Firefox for the sites I care about (like Tagesspiegel, NYT, etc) but left it on for certain ex-employers who I still prefer to leach off of. Despite what most newspapers would have you believe, we've never really paid for our papers, just their delivery. The ads financed the operations and so I figured I better still give them their pennies. Though, admittedly, I leave it on for sites I hate -- a certain ex-employer, for example.

I've also been trying to read more diverse content -- running sites and meta journalism sites. It's helping me understand where all of this is going and why. And I like it.

Last month, I took the final step and cancelled my Tagesspiegel subscription -- I just recycle all of them anyway. Now I just have to figure out how to convince my dad to do the same.