I recently reached a turning point in my life: I decided to stop subscribing to The New York Times. This may seem neither interesting nor unusual; after all, hardly a week passes without at least one headline describing the death of the newspaper industry. Readers are fleeing to the Internet, and advertisers are beginning to follow them. Still, I have been an avid, even obsessive, student of the Times since I was a child. I worked there for ten happy years and have no doubt it will remain the best newspaper in the United States. But the time has come for the Times to change its motto from "All the news that's fit to print" to "All the news that's fit to scroll."

I have been consuming the news online for years — ever since I was a Moscow correspondent for the Times and had no other choice. But I still savored the sound of that trusty thud at my doorstep each morning. Then, a few months ago, it occurred to me that I couldn't remember the last time I picked up the morning paper and saw news that was new to me. I had read it all online before going to sleep. After that, breaking the habit of a lifetime was surprisingly easy.

I went cold turkey in Paris, where the Herald Tribune costs around $4 and the Times is about twice that. The anemic dollar has made prices in London even more ridiculous. None of that mattered to me, though. Armed with my MacBook Air and one of Google's least appreciated applications — Google Reader — I pored over the Times every day and was better informed than I ever have been. That's because Google Reader delivers news the way I want it: in a clear and simple format (it's similar to the way e-mail is delivered in Gmail) and instantaneously. All you have to do is subscribe to the coverage you want: tech news, foreign news, fashion news, sports, or all of that and more. (I went for the Full Monty.) And did I mention that everything is automatically updated all the time?

The Times is the biggest and most important publication I now read online, but far from the only one, since digital browsing is far more congenial than sifting through newsprint. I get the The Economist, several science magazines, and a whole group of geeky blogs on Google Reader, too. It's simple to filter out a subject that bores or depresses you: Imagine a world without Lindsay Lohan, North Korea, or Ralph Nader. And if you want to keep the newspapers looking like anachronistic and ink-stained papers you can even do that: The Times has its own reader that faithfully reproduces the look of the printed version.

But what's the point? It's like trying to sell MP3s by the album. Don't give me those arguments about the "tactile sensation" of ruffling through the broadsheet with your morning coffee. The quill pen and parchment had a nice tactile sensation, too. And the Internet has come a long way since 1996 when Slate, the first truly important online magazine, produced a print version each week — just to hedge its bets. Today, you can mix hundreds of news feeds any way you like and read them on your iPhone. The range of choice is actually the biggest deterrent; democracy can be a burden, and I still like the fact that editors are paid to decide what is worth reading. (As do lots of folks, clearly, since the Times has more than two million subscribers to its daily feed.) Epicurious has half a million; Epi Wonk (one of the world's best medical blogs) has 73, and the Cycling Dude has 47. I read them all.