Conscientious newspaper objector

Published November 7, 2025 4:30am ET



Here’s what I know: If I go to my local newsstand and take a copy of the newspaper without paying for it, that would be stealing, and stealing is wrong. 

But here’s what I also know: If I subscribe to home delivery of a national daily newspaper and that paper is delivered every morning — every morning — to a different, hard-to-locate patch of asphalt nearly 100 yards away from my front door, then the only way to get a resolution to this problem is to go to the newspaper’s customer service webpage, lodge a complaint about a “missing paper,” and demand a credit on my subscription. I have done this every day for several weeks.

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