Why I’ve given up buying printed newspapers.

My problem with newspapers, living where I do, has always been actually getting hold of the things. When I first arrived in Shetland, more than 30 years ago, it would be 2.30pm or so before the blatts made their way to a very limited number of shops. Before the demise of Highland Airways a few months ago, you could sometimes get the dailies at 10.30am, but that was totally dependent on weather. Fog, ridiculous winds, snow, ash, plagues of frogs – all could leave you paperless. Now, with a new contract in place, things have settled down to an irregular 11.00, but with no Guardian in Lerwick – copies aren’t being delivered to the aeroplane in time. It comes from England, you know.

Now, I travel – by bus, car or motorcycle – to Lerwick every weekday, but most of the preparation for the show, most of the day’s computer time, is from 7.00am at home. In our primitive rural redoubt, we have wi-fi. I can access  Guardian Online, the Telegraph, the much improved Herald, the sadly diminished Scotsman, and the fast and furious Daily Record, plus the amazingly competitive Shetland Times and Shetland News presences. Reform Scotland’s fantastic compilation pops into my in-box, as does the Scottish Review’s sarky musings. Caledonian Mercury, though basically an aggregation of (too short) blogs, is always worth a look. Facebook, Twitter and Google News, plus the excellent NewsNow, and of course the glorious BBC, and I’m sorted. Quirky tales for the show? If I’m still short, Ananova Quirky, Yahoo Oddly Enough. There are blogs, of course, galore to choose from, but frequently accessed from Twitterbook. And there’s 38 Minutes for abstruse and often unintentionally hilarious insight into the IT Crowd of Scotland.

This is done on a selection of (mostly old) laptops (Macs and PCs, distributed throughout the house. I don’t have an iPad, and probably – never say never – won’t be buying one. I’m leaning towards Google Android for phones and will wait for the killer Android tablet which is bound to arrive soon, from a reputable manufacturer, and with the stuff that Apple have failed to provide with their giant iPod Touch: USB sockets, Flash etc. This is not about hardware.

It’s simply about access. Admittedly, I’m an extreme case – an inveterate media user who lives at the very edge of traditional distribution networks – but I highlight the simply fact that content is everything,  and that old-fashioned methods of distributing and consuming that content are essentially redundant. Yes, there’s a pleasure to be had in buying a paper and sitting at the Peerie Shop Cafe in Lerwick consuming print and scones. But that’s an indulgence. And an inconvenient one, too, given the sheer stupid unwieldiness of broadsheet newsprint.   If anything displays the stupidity of newspaper management, it’s the insistence on maintaining a tradition of almost unusable  size of  page being linked to ‘quality’. How can we expect them to deal with digitisation if they can’t even understand the limits of  human hand-to-eye co-ordination (especially in a  windy place like Shetland)?

Oh, but we can’t make online pay, comes the whine. Yes you can. Scrap the printing presses, the delivery vans, the chopping down of forests, the whole Victorian infrastructure of newspaper production, and your costs will plummet. And will I pay for a subscription? For some things, yes. Would I pay some kind of central   licensing fee for accessing all of the above outlets?  Here at the Edge of the World, Ultima Thule, with the sea lapping at my door?  So I don’t have to  hassle my way into town to find the plane hasn’t got in? Yes.

Particularly if you give me a free Android tablet to subscribe on…or subsidised, like with Sky boxes and dishes. Come on Rupert, you know it make sense. I’ll even accept that The Times will be hard-wired as home page, until my son hacks it out of there.

At a pinch, I’ll even take a Murdoch iPad…