Starting today the Eureka Reporter has stopped printing papers on Monday and Tuesday, and I feel relieved. While I have enjoyed scanning through the paper each day for news nuggets and the odd odd opinion, I hate having all those blue and clear (from the Times-Standard) plastic bags to deal with. We’re big recyclers (which has cut our garbage total by about half). But I confess I have not been recycling those plastic bags. I think I will add them to my recycle routine. Make it a New Year’s resolution. Besides us, of course, there are all those 10s of thousands of blue bags that are delivered to other homes and the many that I see discarded in gutters throughout the neighborhoods.

Ironically, there is a good My Word column today chastising the Times-Standard’s plastic bag policy in…the Times-Standard. However, I can’t find it anywhere online. There is this opinion piece from Dec. 21 that talks about the evil of plastic bags. But no mention of the ones the newspapers use.

Anyway, getting back to the Eureka Reporter. They recently launched their Flash based e-paper that is supposed to mimic the print version. Like the Times-Standard’s e paper, I don’t get the point of this except to pretend there is some added value for the advertisers to see their ads online as they appear in the print version (when there is a print version).  I find navigating these things awkward and frustrating and basically contrary to the whole purpose of the web (hint: linking). But, now that it’s built, I suppose it’s pretty easy to maintain. I also don’t get their justification for asking all the information to gain access to th e-paper. I can’t imagine any advertiser accepting that kind of user information as accurate. It’s easy enough to create a throw away email address and put in fake information to get an account to access the e-paper.

I do like some things about the new html version of the site, though.  It finally offers the ability to place comments (all anonymously, so no need for an account). They are finally offering RSS Feeds as well. It’s a Drupal site, so one might imagine they will be adding more services as they install and configure more Drupal modules. Will blogs be far behind, now that the T-S has adopted that feature in a big way?