I don't remember when it started but by the time I graduated from college with a degree in school newspaper, I very much wanted to work for The New York Times. A very close friend even made me a needlepoint with the words: "New York Times or Bust!"

Amazingly enough, I made it to the Times, starting as a copy boy right after graduation and eventually earning promotion to reporter trainee and then full reporter. I've previously written on Switchboard about my adventures covering a famous garbage barge for the Times and will undoubtedly draw back on other memories in the future.

So that's why it really really hurt when I recently cancelled my subscription to the Times. The old gray lady had been a constant in my life since my college days. In fact, when I was on a copy editing internship at the Buffalo Courier-Express in the summer of 1982 (right before that paper was shut down by its new owners), I decided that I would begin every morning by reading each and every word in the Times. For three months, I did just that and found myself amazed at the paper's scope and intelligence.

Now I no longer stop at the end of the driveway every morning and grab the blue plastic bag that contained the paper. No longer do I drag a stack of old papers onto airplanes for catch up reading. (And no longer do I have to contort myself into inhumane positions to read the paper in the increasingly cramped airplanes seats.)

Why? Well I got an Amazon Kindle for my birthday and now the contents of each day's New York Times automatically download into my sleeping Kindle each night. For way less than the price of a paper subscription to the Times, I also get The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, each of them wirelessly downloaded overnight.

Think about it. Typically by the time I received the paper copy of the Times, I had already read most of the big stories on the Times website. In fact, most often a newer version of the big story was already on the Times website by the time I received the paper.

And the waste. I've already mentioned the blue plastic bag. But what about the endless reams of paper and drums of ink that go into making the paper each day. And the energy that is used up by harvesting the trees, transporting them to paper mills, sending the paper to the printing plants, actually printing the daily newspaper and then sending it to all points of the country (and earth). It is mind boggling when you think about the natural resources that go into making a newspaper and how quickly it becomes garbage. (Or recycling ... but given the number of newspapers I see dumped into the trash each morning at Penn Station, I'm not so confident about that.)

Is the Kindle everything I could ever want? No. I find clipping stories difficult and it took me a while before I learned the rhythm of reading the paper electronically. I don't get to see the ads and that is actually a downside when your job involves tracking what's being said in the world (and must really hurt the folks in the ad division at the paper).

I also miss seeing the front page, which tells you in a glance how the editors ranked the importance of the day's news.

But the Kindle is exceedingly new technology and I know it will improve tremendously in the next several years. Unlike newspapers, which have pretty much been based on the same technology for a really long time. (I'll talk about how the Kindle handles books, another huge part of my life, in a future post.)

I will admit to coveting my neighbor's newspaper this morning at a neighborhood diner. After all, it is not easy to give up a 25-year tradition. But I know what I've done is best. Even if it hurt. A lot.