? on newspaper vs. other substrates

I see a lot of experienced people here using newspaper, and others using different things. Right now I have coconut bark/repti bark type stuff. My question is: Is the "prettier" bark type stuff really for us just because it looks nicer? Is newspaper absolutley fine? And, would a snake prefer the sports page or the funnies? ;)

I like newspaper because it is FREE, and easy to clean (I am a lazy person, but with 18 snakes I think I have a good reason to pick the easy way)

I use bed-a-beast for my sand boas because they are burrowing snakes, it wouldn't be fair to put them on newspaper.

We've used plain white paper towels, newspaper, cypress mulch and aspen. So far I have to say I like the aspen best though newspaper is much cheaper (or outright free) so as we get even more snakes we may go back to that. For now the aspen is working out fine, our humidity is good with it and it's very easy to spot clean. The only issue we've ever found with it is with our biggest females. Because they are pretty heavy girls they do seem to compress the aspen down a lot so I just give it a good toss every other day so the heat from under their tubs comes through more consistently.


~~Jo~~