So I subscribed to The New Yorker on the iPad for a month. Four issues received so far and I am 2+ issues behind. There was a reason I hadn’t been getting the magazine.
Same with the dead-tree New York Times. I fetch it from the driveway, put it on the kitchen table, and skim it the day after tomorrow.
I believe I have become a creature wholly of the serendipitous web. And it’s not just for short posts and 140-character tweets. I read a lot of longer online articles.
But I very much like creating my own reading list. And I don’t like feeling obligated to read something because I paid for it — even from the very best sources.
I doubt I am unique. I wonder if publishers have considered this as they set up their pay walls and iPad applications. The aggregators have set us free; who’s going back?
As an indulgence before the dark days, I subscribed to both the Wall Street Journal as well as the Christian Science Monitor. I tried keeping up with being a father of young sons, new engineer AND reading both sources. Then I tried skimming and clipping.
But the end result was a years worth of WSJ going into the composter and Monitor going in the trash.
I subscribe to the Monitor online and rarely have time to read it. But it is the kind of source I want to support. Like NPR.
Yes, I tend to agree with you. It’s similar to how file-sharing sites and iTunes made buying a whole album pretty archaic. This is how people read news now, and I don’t think it’s going to change much. The sites with paywalls risk getting left out of the conversation.