Take your sheet of newspaper and give it a light spritz of PAM cooking spray
before crumpling it up.

In the long term, take section 1 of your sunday newspaper (big and thick)
and pour 1/4 cup of used vegetable oil on it. GIve a week to soak in. Than
use a sheet of it to start your fire.

Go to your home center and buy a stick of fireplace starter (wax and saw
dust). Cut the stick into icecube sized chunks. Use one of those chunks to
start the charcoal

I never had much luck with just newspaper either

"Mike S." > wrote in message
oups.com...
>I recently purchased a charcoal chimney starter, followed the
> directions, and it basically did nothing. I stuck 2-3 pieces of wadded
> newspaper in the bottom, filled the top part with charcoal (not to the
> the very top), then lit the newspaper on fire in multiple places.
> 20-30 minutes later the whole thing was barely warm. The bottom
> charcoals were barely warm.
>
> What happened? Any ideas? I'm thinking that it may be the charcoal.
> The kind I'm using is 60% bigger than Kingsford's charcoal which is
> probably the standard size. Although, I really don't see how the size
> of the charcoal would make that much difference. But, this year I've
> had problems with the charcoal not getting hot enough with lighter
> fluid. I didn't have this problem last year. When using lighter fluid,
> I use two different brands and sizes of charcoal. But I still never
> had this problem last year.
>