What are newspapers good for?

How do you get your daily news? Do you still use the old newspaper of yesteryear? We don't, as we have long ago switched to the electronic version of the object that a dog – if we had one – could have fetched us each morning, from the street to the breakfast table. From time to time, however, once in a blue-moon perhaps, we get a copy of some newsprint; either the local paper or the venerable New York Times, and I must say that we enjoy flipping the pages, discovering things we might have missed online and seeing its content in a refreshing, “analog way.”

So beside that sporadic “feel-good” use of a paper, what else can we miss about it? I'll give you my personal view and it has to do with past issues. I find them wonderful for cleaning up wild mushrooms or certain vegetables and also irreplaceable for doing certain specific paint jobs. When I do that, I also indulge into some more reading and keep on discovering (old) information that I had never read before. The day they fully vanish from this side of the earth, I'll essentially miss newspapers for these attributes, but will feel relieved for all the trees that will have been saved...