I think some people have said before that the ink on newspaper could potentially be harmful to them if ingested? I'm not sure though. However, I will say that I bedded my rats down on paper (large sheets of packing paper, no ink), and I didn't find it as satisfactory as fleece. It's not as soft and snuggly, and it's easily shredded and made a mess of. Yeah, you don't have to do laundry, but scraping pee-cemented scraps of paper off of their base pan isn't fun either, lol. That might have just been my boys though. But, it wasn't a few months on paper before I switched them back over to regular cheap fleece. Plus, I don't think it provided enough cushion; both of my rats (who were admittedly portly before I slimmed them down) developed a pressure sore on one of their hind feet. It improved with weight loss and bedding them on fleece, but never fully disappeared. I think that using it in their litter pan wouldn't be bad, though. If it's about the cost, I buy cheap fleece blankets from Walmart, CVS, etc., and you can re-wash them so you don't have to purchase more until they get too chewed up.