Sometimes Parting Is Just So Easy
With so many reliable, trustworthy and well-written publications available in print and online M and I decided not to renew our subscription to the Greeley Tribune next time it came up. It's not a protest decision as much as one reflecting how little value the Tribune offers. The renewal notice came in the mail this week, I checked in with M and we reconfirmed our decision. 
Today's Page 1 lede just made it so easy to follow through.
The Greeley Tribune generally is poorly written, riddled with elementary grammar errors and baldly partisan. We had stayed on anyway because there are so few sources for local news but even their coverage of south Weld County has been getting thin lately. And unlike publications such as the New York Times, the Tribune's publisher has the gall to charge print subscribers an additional fee for online access. (I never paid it.)
One expects a newspaper's editorial board to take positions on important issues but most reserve opinion for the editorial pages, not the news section. For several months the Tribune has run a weekly full page promotion for the oil and gas industry in it's A Section, but has never exercised the integrity to label it as the advertising it obviously represents. Today they trumped even that on Page 1, deriding the people of Longmont and Fort Collins - unlike the paragons of public service in Greeley - for "having difficulty accepting that fracking really is good." For those of us who daily dodge rampaging drilling rigs and service trucks on the roads, slide through spilled fluids and mud on the highways and endure the stench of new sources of exhaust and fugitive volatile toxins fracking is far from unreservedly beneficial. 
So goodbye Greeley Tribune, and thanks for making it so easy to leave you to your own little world.  

Update: The Greeley Tribune web site does not post the lede found in the print editions. here is the entire headline and lede:
"A familiar partnership
"Greeley officials and residents - for the most part - like the results of oil and gas drilling in its limits. But other cities, like Longmont and Fort Collins, are having difficulty accepting that fracking really is good." (Emphasis theirs.)