Subscriptions

The New Yorker

I used to read The New Yorker. I don't know why I quit. Probably because a new issue would show up every week and I never got around to reading them and then I ended up with a giant stack of like-new magazines that I had to consign to the dustbin in order to maintain my sanity. They publish some good stuff. They also publish a lot of nonsense, but that's just the way the media runs these days. Anyway, I got a promotional email this morning. I was going to delete it, but then I wondered if there might be an email address buried in there, so I looked, and lo and behold, there was. So I wrote them this little message:

I am not going to subscribe to The New Yorker or The Washington Post or The New York Times. I don't want to be locked into one news feed and I don't want to be paying subscription fees to half a dozen different outfits. That shit can add up to real money.

What I want is a subscription service that lets me read from any number of sites. To make things fair, that service would keep track of what stories each subscriber accessed, how long they spent reading it (and if they actually read it, but that might be tricky) and then divy up the fees amongst all the news providers on a proportional basis.

I don't understand why someone hasn't done this, other than the old paper empires are still locked in old ways of thinking.

If I keep promoting this idea maybe someone will latch onto it and run with it.