This happens all the time to me. I subscribed to the Philly Inquirer for a couple of months after moving here, then cancelled, and now it shows up for a week or so every so often for no reason. I just throw it out without reading it.

The same thing happens with the county daily, and I've never subscribed to it.

Same here. I've never subscribed to the Boston Globe and always tell them I don't want it when they call.

Then they started leaving issues in my driveway, in a promotional sleeve. One was a Sunday paper, so I looked at it. All it did was remind me of why I hate the newspaper (among other things, reading bad writing is bad for your writing).*

Did they leave one issue and then call to see how I liked it? Of course not, they left them every day for a week. I felt like calling them and asking them to please clean up my driveway...

*the reverse is also true (reading good writing is good for your writing) -- so we aren't really wasting time reading our favorite blogs, are we? we're improving our prose! or our potential prose anyway...

The Austin American Statesman does this one better: they throw "complimentary" papers into the yards of whole neighborhoods. Our neighborhood gets "papered" about twice a month.

Of course, if you divde all of Austin into 15 or so areas and throw a complimentary copy into one area every day, you increase your "readership" by 1/15th the population of Austin.

It's a lie, but that's what they have sunk to.

I have cancelled my local paper - The Kansas City Star - magazines- Time, Newsweek, Playboy because I was tired of financing their liberal dogma. I still get "executive discounts" in the mail all the time for the magazines. It is a great discount $20.00 a year for the weekly news magazines - but I so dislike my news being filtered.
With the popularity of Fox News - the only news organization I know of that is growing - you would think these other news organizations would change their reporting. nope. I call it the "All the president's Men" syndrome. All these young lefties got into Journalism after this movie, so they could expose the corrupt political machine, that they became the ultimate corrupt machine - the mainstream media.

LAT calls our house every other month or so, and try to talk us out of our Orange County Register subscription. I tell them every time to take us off their list, but they just ignore me.

Last week, a kid about 8 years old rang our doorbell. He was GIVING AWAY COPIES OF THE TIMES. No thanks.

So it's come to this. The LAT can't give their paper away. It's only a matter of time before they close their Orange County offices, and draw back into the shell of L.A.

After that -- I dunno, but I won't care because they'll leave me alone.

LAT calls our house every other month or so, and try to talk us out of our Orange County Register subscription. I tell them every time to take us off their list, but they just ignore me.

Isn't there a non-trivial fine (several hundred bucks?) for telemarketers who don't take you off their call list when asked?

If they send you a reply-paid envelope, a sure fire way to get of their list ASAP is to tape it to a brick and send it back.

Make sure your name is on it, so they know who to take off their list.

I know someone who did that to AMEX and received an angry phone call (it cost the company a couple of hundred bucks) but well and truly got off their mailing list.

I feel your pain. All of you. I'm intimately familiar with all of these problems. And there are better ways of dealing with things. In fact, I deliver newspapers (it pays more than blogging), and being a paper carrier has given me some unique insight into the business. Instead of taking up a lot of space here, just go read what I wrote on my blog, http://iamthepaperboy.blogspot.com/2005/09/red-faced-rag-wranglers-blues.html.