Wow, newspapers are really getting desperate.

I just got another call from a newspaper telemarketer (yes, yet again). When I said that I still wasn’t interested in a newspaper, he asked where I got my news, so I told him from the Internet. So far, no different than every other time these guys have called.

(My answer was automatic, but not completely true. I also get some news from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, sometimes. It’s pretty bad when fake comedy news shows are a better source of information than the real ones, but that’s a different subject.)

This time, he started something new, an obviously scripted spiel that began “reading news online doesn’t give you the whole story…”

Um, hello? I think they’ve got it backward. Reading news online usually gives me more of the story than a newspaper could. I can get multiple articles on any story that interests me, and I can get much more current news too. And it’s a lot more convenient, no newsprint to bleed ink all over my hands and to have to deal with afterward. In any case, my answer was to interrupt with: “I disagree. Thank you,” followed by hanging up on him when he tried to keep talking.

If newspapers started regularly doing real investigative reporting again, instead of just regurgitating AP wire stories that I can read anywhere, I might be convinced to pay — for a digital copy — of them, as yet another source of news. Otherwise they’re an irrelevant dinosaur, and I really wish they’d leave me alone.