Death of a Newspaper

We are having a garage sale this weekend! The traditional rigamorole for doing a garage sale is to prep your stuff and then go down to the newspaper (the Times-Colonist). You are supposed to stand in a line-up of advertisers and wait for the first available window. Place your ad and people will come in droves. Hooray!Today, I went to the Classifieds department of the TC. There are two wickets for classifieds-- one was closed. The other one had the only other customer there: an elderly woman showing off pictures of her cats. Eventually, she figured out that I was waiting and she took her cat pictures home. I stepped up. I wanted my ad to simply read the address, what we're selling and the hours. Nope. They gave me three lines to say what I wanted, but they insisted-- INSISTED-- that the ad starts with "Victoria." The "Victoria" ads are all lumped under a sub-heading of "Victoria", so why have line-after-line repeat the same phrase? I said, "That's fine-- I'll just post it on UsedVictoria and Craigslist and save myself the $20." The poor girl behind the counter sheepishly nodded and said, "Sure, that's understandable." Tonight, as I write this, I thought: let's check if I can place the ad I want via the online version of the TC. Bing! Yes, I can with a few twists:

• I can place the ad for free.
• If I pay $30 or $40, I have to put my neighbourhood at the start; if I do not pay for it, I do not have this limitation.
• It has to run for 14 day (so we will have a garage sale ad lingering for 11 days after the sale.) Keep that in mind, the next time you go to the TC for an ad: there's a cluster dead ads and a couple live soldiers hiding amongst the bodies.
• They send you a username/password for a Canada.com account.
• You can change your password, but you cannot login with the account and password.

Part of me is sad that new media is killing off old media. Part of me thinks it has it coming.