Orlando Sentinel

It’s always there, on my drive or on line. Well worth the money. A democracy depends on its newspapers. I pay for the Sentinel, NYT, Washington Post, and WSJournal. OK, I’m a retired news junkie. But I want news from professional, trained journalists. I want to know what our local, state, and national representatives are doing. I almost always, including this year vote a split ticket. Those who get “free” news from cable or internet get a lot of untruths, lies, that may have been planted by Russia, China, or Iran. Our newspapers make mistakes, but most separate editorial from news, and correct when they make mistakes. The Sentinel tries to do that. And they support Scot Maxwell, who is one of the best there is. I always read him first. I have had a Sentinel subscription since I moved to Florida in 1963. Have never been sorry.

You can tell the Sentinel, once part of the proud Chicago Tribune chain, is owned by a venture capital company. There’s no investment in the paper, just in its overlords’ profits. I pay $16 a month for a subscription to electronic content only, but trying to read the paper is nearly impossible. The website is stocked with filler, old news, brief, never-followed up police reports, and short paragraphs rewritten from Twitter. The e-newspaper, a replica of the print version, has some substance, but the damned thing crashes or produces a black screen whenever I try to access it. I pay twice as much for my Sentinel subscription as I do for my Tampa Bay Times ($7 a month) and Washington Post ($100 a year) e-subscriptions. If the e-paper just worked I would grumble but put up with it to support local journalism. But to cancel I have to spend a minimum of 30 minutes on hold before I can talk to some guy in India who functions as the circulation department. Maybe I’ll just cancel the credit card the subscription is attached to. That might be easier. Seriously, think twice about purchasing a subscription here. The Sentinel was a good paper 20 years ago. Now with cost cutting to the bone, there’s very little left, and good luck trying to find a way to read it.

As a former Central Florida resident with friends and family still in the area, it’s a great way to keep in touch as to the comings and going‘s and notes of interest in the area. More than once I’ve been told I know more about what’s going on in the area than those that live down there do. The only thing that I miss is the way it used to be organized because to me it is now a little bit harder to find sections of interest that I used to enjoy reading. Other than that I enjoy the app.