My Favorite Free Newspapers and Magazines on the Web

When The New York Times put up a paywall I stopped reading it.  I love The New York Times, but $180 a year is outrageous for what was once free.  I was even more shocked at that the same content costs even more to read on a tablet or smart phone.  I found ways around their monthly page limits, but ultimately I just gave up trying to regularly read the paper.  I’m not against newspapers and magazines charging money for their content, I just think it needs to be a fair price.  Of course a fair price is like beauty, and is set in the eyes of the beholder.  $15 a month might be the right price for upscale New Yorkers, but not to me.  If The New York Times charged $29.95 a year for digital subscriptions, I’d be a subscriber.  Instead I decided to go looking for other sources of news.

By the way, I have a weird concept about periodical pricing.  A newspaper that produces 365 editions a year sounds like it should cost more than a magazine that produces twelve issues a year.  But I can only read so much per day, and only involve with myself with so many periodicals.  On average, I read about as much from a daily newspaper as I do from a weekly or monthly journal, so in my mind, they each require a reading grazing fee, which should be about equal.  The difference between magazines and newspaper titles is not quantity, but quality of writing and the amount I can read.  Since I can only read an hour or less a day on periodical publications, I’m not willing to spend more than $15 a month total for my newsy reading.

As long as some publishers offer free content I’m going to consider it first.  The internet is full of free content, but which free source of essays and articles are the best?  What content is worth paying for if it was reasonably priced?  I pay $9.99 a month to Rdio for streaming digital music.  I subscribe to The Rolling Stone Magazine and The New York Review of Books on my iPad.  I’m open to paying for more content, but the price has to be right.

Commercial newspapers and magazines generally produce the best writing anywhere because they pay professional writers.  In searching for the best content on the web, I tend to find the highest concentration of quality writing at print magazine and newspaper sites.  These free sites are so good I would pay for them if I had to and the price was right.

And paywalls sites still offer lots of free content. The New York Times is very generous by allowing readers following links to read full articles.  Other sites, like New Scientist suck readers in but quickly cut off the flow of free words.  But even NS will offer some free complete reads.

The sample articles I use come from my Evernote clippings or from my Twitter feed, which I use to remember articles I read and like.

The Atlantic

Far and away, my favorite free online magazine is The Atlantic.  Their website provides content from their print magazine along with original content written just for the web.  I subscribe to their daily updates which recommends 3-5 articles to read each day.  The Atlantic’s web reporting equals their top tier print reporting.

• The Robot Will See You Now
• The Plague Years, in Film and Memory
• Think Artists Don’t Make Anything Off Music Sales? These Graphs Prove You Wrong
• 100 Years Ago, The 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade

 

Los Angeles Times

I started noticing the Los Angeles Times when Zite frequently sent me there to read book reviews.  Zite is a tablet app that does for article reading what Pandora does for music.  You thumbs up and down what you read and Zite finds more of what you like.  The LA Times evidently is writing more of what I like to read.

• In search of ‘The Searchers’ and the history behind the western
• The Operatic Life of Richard Nixon
• Farewell to Novels by David R. Slavitt

 

The Smithsonian

I can’t figure out if content for The Smithsonian is blocked or if they just end every article with “subscribe now for more coverage” to scare you into thinking there’s more to be had if you plunk down some dollars.  I keep finding plenty of free stuff to read.  Fascinating stuff.  Actually, more great stuff to read even if I read 24×7.  Here is the listing for the last March, 2013 issue.  And here is the start of the archive section.

• True Colors
• The Ten Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries
• The Meanest Girls at the Watering Hole
• The Lost Tribes of the Amazon
• Dickens’ Secret Affair

 

The Guardian

The Guardian is another newspaper that Zite often takes me to.   Zite and Google links me to foreign newspapers, which is one of the great pluses of the world wide web.  Zite knows I love book reviews and both the LA Times and The Guardian reviews a lot of books.

• Amazon rainforest tribe at centre of new cultural storm
• The top 100 books of all time
• World’s conservation hopes rest on Ecuador’s revolutionary Yasuni model

 

Brain Pickings

Brain Pickings isn’t a commercial newspaper or magazine, but it’s so professional that it should be.  Maria Popova is a professional writer who has created a beautiful web site that she calls “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.”  Brain Pickings is classy blog written by a professional writer with amazing graphic design skills.  I wish Auxiliary Memory was 1/100th as good.

• The Age of Edison:  Radical Invention and the Illuminated World
• The Best Science Books of 2012
• The Daily Routines of Famous Writers
• New Year’s Resolution Reading List:  9 Books on Reading and Writing
• 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design

 

Edge.org

John Brockman’s Edge.org is where the world’s smartest people hang out.  The site is built around conversations with cutting edge thinkers, but it also focuses on the latest science books.  The conversations are often a narrative overview of a current project.  Edge.org is not a newspaper or magazine, but the quality of content is so great that it competes well with professional journalism.  The contributors are major science writers and philosophers, writing about research on the front lines of new knowledge.

• The Normal Well-Tempered Mind – Daniel C. Dennett
• How Culture Drove Human Evolution – Joseph Henrich
• Linked Data:  Web Science and semantic Web – Tim Berners-Lee

 

Most sites on the web are free.  It’s hard to imagine that pay sites can compete with so much quality free content.  My six favorite sites are just a drop in the gigantic WWW bucket.  My goal is to find the right mixture of reporting that gives me the best puzzle pieces for mapping reality.  All too often we read news that is immediately forgotten.  I want to read articles that educate me with a lasting impact.  In fact, I often think reading less on the internet is better.

Like junk food with empty calories, the web is full of junk data and empty facts.  Brilliant articles that are available for all to share should have a great impact on our society.  It used to be people had to buy books and journals to get quality information.  Now all seven billion of us have access to a tremendous amount of free knowledge.  We can all be renaissance men and women.  The quest is to find the needle in the haystack article to read each day that makes a lasting impression.

Tools like Zite let me quickly review 20-30 newly published articles each day, out of thousands.  But the real goal, is to find the single article that’s worthy of study, contemplation and memory.

However, there is a problem with this system.  It only gets me the free articles.  What if the best articles still cost money?  Is the best knowledge being shared today, or withheld?

JWH – 3/3/13

Kindle Magazines FYI

Last year I started subscribing to several magazines at the Kindle Newsstand and read them on my iPad.  For $1.99 or $2.99 a month, it’s very easy to try out a magazine.  Then towards the end of the year I realized I wasn’t reading these magazines and cancelled my subscriptions.  I figured I’d wait until I had time to read, then go through the back issues and decide if I really wanted to subscribe again.  Well, today I went to look at some of the back issues and they wouldn’t download.  I got a message “License Limit Reached.”

At first this message seem to imply that I had too many registered devices.  I have two iPod touches, two e-ink Kindles, one iPad, one Kindle cloud reader, and six different PC readers.  I deregistered everything but one touch, two Kindles and one iPad.  Still got the message.  So I called Amazon.  The first lady I talked to was very nice, but she eventually bumped me up a service level.  The second lady knew exactly what my problem was.  If you cancel your subscription, but haven’t downloaded the magazines you bought to a device yet, you will get the license limit reached error.

I told her I felt I had bought those magazines and assumed I’d always have them.  She said unfortunately, that’s not how the system works with the licensing agreement they have with the magazines.  I didn’t think that was right, but the lady I was talking with was very nice, and I assumed she was stuck with this policy, so it wasn’t Amazon’s fault.  The helpdesk lady did apologize and gave me a token credit.

FYI:  always download your magazines from the cloud to your devices before you cancel your subscription.    And I noticed that I didn’t have this problem with my old issues of The Rolling Stone Magazine.  I had just re-subscribed to it.  But then I couldn’t remember I had previously downloaded all those issues.  So just for kicks, I re-subscribed to The New York Review of Books, and viola, my old issues were again available to download.

Crazy Subscription Pricing

I read on the iPad with the Kindle reader to save trees.  It just ecological.  Also, you can try a magazine without buying a whole year’s worth.  Most magazines at the Kindle Newsstand are available for a monthly fee.  But pricing is crazy.

Yesterday, at my favorite bookstore, I saw an issue of The Rolling Stone Magazine I wanted to read.  It was $4.99, plus tax at the book store.  It’s $1.99 a month at Amazon, which means I get 2 issues for $1.99, a savings of $8 over the newsstand price of two issues.  26 issues is $19.97 a year via a paper subscription – or 77 cents an issue.  So I’m paying Amazon $23.88 a year for the electronic version, or 92 cents an issue.

So the cheapest way to get The Rolling Stone is to buy the paper copy and have them mail it to you.  How is that even possible?  I’m paying them $4 a year more not to print the magazine and mail it to me.  Not only that, but if I subscribed to the paper copy I’d be eligible to read the entire archive of back issues online.  This is a conundrum for me.  I want to be ecological.  A lot of carbon goes into printing and mailing, and that makes me feel guilty about the physical copy subscription.  But for $4 less money I’d get the digital archive!  That’s so tempting.

You’d think they’d charge less for the Kindle edition because there’s no printing or postal costs.  Maybe Amazon’s cut requires the increase, yet Amazon also sells the paper subscriptions for $19.97, just two cents more than Rolling Stones does with it’s fall out cards in the mag.

The New York Review of Books is $41.88 yearly at the Kindle Newsstand at $3.49 a month, but it’s $69.00 a year at their site, or $74.95 a year for the paper and online edition. So Amazon is a bargain, except once again I don’t get access to the digital archive.  I’d rather pay less and read The New York Review of Books on my iPad, but I sure would love access to the digital archive.

The Future of Magazine

It seems obvious that we’re moving toward a digital future.  Why waste all that money on printing and postage when magazines can be instantly delivered.  To me the perfect magazine subscription would be the cheapest with the least commitment, along with access to the entire archive of the magazine’s history.  I’m willing to pay a monthly fee for new and old.  What I’d really love is paying a monthly fee like Netflix’s and get access to a bunch of magazines.  Next Issue does offer such a service now for $10-15 a month, but they don’t have the magazines I want to read.  It’s like cable TV, 200 channels and nothing to watch.  I’m currently subscribing to two magazines that totals $5.48 a month.  If The Rolling Stone and The New York Review of Books were available at Next Issue along with 1-2 other magazines I wanted, then $10 a month would be a good deal.  I’d need 5-6 magazines I really wanted to make it worth $15 a month.  I’ll keep my eye out on Next Issue, but for now it seems weight towards women’s magazines.

JWH – 2/24/13

Rethinking Magazines on the iPad 2 and Kindle 3

Since I’m a gadget freak I wanted to love reading magazines on the iPad and Kindle.  It wasn’t love at first sight though.  Reading a digital magazine takes different skills than reading a paper magazine, and at 60 it’s not always easy to teach an old dog new tricks.  However, I’m an old dog that’s become very near sighted, and having a tablet is like having a handicap device that helps me with my physical failings.

Because I can make the font larger, and the photos larger and brighter, the experience of reading on a tablet wins out over paper, but I’m not saying it’s magical.  Zite, a reading app for the iPad, is magical.  Think Pandora for articles instead of playing songs, because I can’t show you what Zite looks like.  Zite isn’t on the web, it’s only for iOS, Android and webOS mobile devices.  But even Zite is just a start.

We need a new paradigm for magazine reading.

Right now publishers are working hard to make magazines look identical to their printed versions on the tablet screen, but that’s ignoring the power of the computer built into the tablet.  And I’ve got to wonder why I have to page through ads when I pay more for the iPad version of magazine than I do for a printed subscription.  For example I could get Rolling Stone for $20 on paper, but I’m paying $36 for the digital.  WTF? 

If I’m going to pay more, why not make reading easier and forget the printed layout and ads?  But I doubt that will happen.  Zite usually jettisons the ads, and its free.  So, how does that business model work?  It won’t for long.  What’s needed is a paid Zite subscription.

I get The New Yorker on my Kindle 3 and it does leave out the printed formatting and ads.  It’s pure text reading.  The Kindle 3 is much lighter and easier to hold than the iPad, so reading The New Yorker is a pleasure, but not visually exciting.  A step backward, although it’s much easier on the eyes.

When I’m reading just words, whether for a book or magazine, I much prefer reading them on the Kindle e-ink screen, or the retinal display of my iPod touch.  The damn iPad is a pain to hold.  But if I want to see photos I need the iPad.  This is probably why the Kindle Fire is a 7” tablet.  But none of these devices are perfect.  In fact, reading nirvana is nowhere to be seen.

It’s like that new ad on TV for the Microsoft phone that claims up till now all smart phones have been beta devices.  Well, we’re still in beta when it come to tablets and magazine reading.

In fact, I’m ready to give up magazines altogether, either print or digital.  Zite has taught me that, as well as the Best American series of anthologies that come out each year collecting the best magazine magazine writing into ebooks to read on the Kindle.

Magazines have a lot of content I just don’t want to read or look at.  When I could flip through a paper copy it was easy to ignore the crap, but with a digital edition the easiest way to read a magazine is to start at the beginning and flip pages till the end.  That just reminds me of how much content I don’t want to see.

How often have you paid several dollars to read one article in a magazine?  How often have you paid several dollars for a magazine and read none of the articles, just flip through the pages, reading snatches here and there and looked at some pictures?  Magazines are like cable TV, 200 channels when you really only want 8.

What we need is magazine article singles, like buying songs at iTunes.  Articles should be 99 cents for long meaty ones, and less for shorter ones.

Like I said, this transition from paper to digital is making me rethink magazines.  Either digital magazines need to become a whole lot better at providing just what I want for a fair price, or I’m going to either give up on reading magazines altogether, or just go back to paper editions that I only buy with very cheapo subscription deals.

I’m not sure the iPad is the wonder gadget that I thought it was.  Except for Words with Friends and Zite, most of my dozens of app icons go untapped.  I’ve bought some of those fancy multimedia books and never read them.  They are neat for a few minutes, but not for hours.  Most of the digital magazines I’ve bought haven’t been read.  In fact, my New Yorker issues pile up in my Kindle 3 just like how the paper copies used to pile up unread.

JWH – 5/2/12   

The Strange Pricing of Digital Goods

I buy a lot of digital goods and services but I’ve noticed that there is no consistency in pricing.  For example I subscribe to Rdio.com and pay $4.99 a month for access to millions of songs and albums.  Yet, The New York Times wants $15-$35 a month for access to just one newspaper.  $60 a year for 15,000,000 songs versus $180 for 365 issues of one newspaper – can you spot the obvious bargain?

Yet for $7.99 a month, or $96 a year I get access to 75,000 movies and TV shows at Netflix.  $7.99 a month is also the price Hulu Plus charges for thousands of shows too.  So why does one newspaper cost $15 a month, especially since it was free for years.  I love reading The New York Times, but I can’t make myself pay $15 a month for it when I get so much music for $4.99 a month, and so many movies and TV shows for $7.99 a month.  If I was getting access to several great papers for $7.99 a month I’d consider it a fair deal.  But for one title, I think it should be much less.

This makes The New York Times appear to be very expensive.  However, The Wall Street Journal is $3.99 a week, or $207.48 a year. Strangely, The Economist, a weekly is $126.99 a year for print and digital, or $126.99 for just digital. Go figure.

I also get digital audio books from Audible.com.  I pay $229.50 for a 24 pack, which is $9.56 per book, but they often have sales for $7.95 and $4.95 a book.  I can get two books from Audible for what I’d pay for 30 daily papers, but I actually spend way more time listening to books than I’d spend reading the paper online. 

I subscribe to several digital magazines through the Kindle store.  Right now I’m getting a month of The New Yorker for $2.99, but that’s suppose to go up to $5.99 soon.  (What is it about stuff from New York being more expensive?)  Most of the magazines I get from Amazon are $1.99 a month, way under the cost for a printed copy at the newsstand.  The Rolling Stone is $2.99 and I usually get two issues in a month.  So for $15 a month, the price of The New York Times, I get 11 magazines (4 New Yorkers, 2 Rolling Stones, Discover, Maximum PC, National Geographic, Home Theater and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction).  That’s a lot of reading for $15 a month, and a lot of variety.

However, I also subscribe to Zite, an app on my iPad where I do the most of my news reading, and that’s free.  I get free articles from those magazines above and who knows how many more, all for free.  In fact, I spend so much time reading Zite, because it’s customized to my interests, that I’m thinking of cancelling my magazine subscriptions.  But that’s another issue.  Like when I subscribed to paper copies of magazines I mostly let them go unread.

Even if I paid $15 a month for The New York Times I’m not sure how many articles I would read above the 10 articles a month they offer now for free.  I don’t expect everything to be free on the internet, but sadly, paid content has to compete with free.  Zite, which is free, is actually worth $15 a month, because I get access to zillions of magazine articles, newspaper stories, and web blogs.

I’m also a subscriber to Safari Books Online, a subscription library to technical books.  I pay $9.99 a month and get to have 5 books a month “checked out” to read.  I can keep them longer, but I have to keep them at least one month.  So for $120 a year I get to read as many as 60 books, which means the price could be as low as $2 a book.  That’s a bargain when most computer books are $40-50.

And I’m a member of Amazon Prime.  For $79 a year I get unlimited 2-day shipping, access to 12 ebooks (1 a month from their library of 100,000 titles) and unlimited access to thousands of movies and TV shows.  This is another tremendous bargain.  I also buy ebooks for my Kindle and iPad from Amazon.  Costs run from free to $9.99.  On very rare occasions I’ll pay more, but it hurts.  Digital books just seem less valuable than physical books.  I don’t feel like I collect digital books like I do with hardcovers.  I don’t even feel I own ebooks.

Next Issue Media is now offering a library of digital magazines Netflix style for $9.99-$14.99 a month, but only one of the magazines I currently subscribe to, The New Yorker, is part of the deal.  If all of my regular magazines and The New York Times were part of the deal, then I’d go for it.  However, Zite with it’s intelligent reading system would still dominate my reading.  Flipping through magazines is just too time consuming.  What I want is a Zite Plus, a service that provides access to all the free and paid content I like to read.

Can you spot the trend in all of this?

I think most people on the net are willing to pay for digital goods if they get a bargain, especially if it’s part of a library of goods like Netflix, Rdio, Rhapsody, Spotify, Hulu Plus, Safari Online, Amazon Prime, etc.

And there is another issue about buying digital goods.  Some companies charge extra if you use their content on a smartphone.  Rdio and Spotify are $4.99 a month for listening on your computer but $9.99 a month to also listen on your smartphone.  The New York Times is $15/month for reading online and smartphone, $20 for online and tablet, and $35 for online, smartphone and tablet.  Why the heck is that?  It’s the same damn words.  Why would they care where you read their paper.

Netflix charges $7.99 a month and you can watch it on a whole array of possible devices.

JWH – 4/24/12

Zite versus RSS

Up until recently RSS was the best technology for taming the Internet.  You selected a RSS reader, like Google Reader, and subscribed to all the sites you thought valuable.  The trouble is most sites send too many posts, so you get way more feeds than you want to read.

What I dreamed about was software that would look at what’s being published on the Internet while being able to read my mind and select just the stories I would love to read.  Zite isn’t that software, but it’s pretty damn close.  It does all the hard work of surfing the net far and wide to find what I might like to read, and then slowly learns from what I really like.  It becomes a customized magazine.

When I got my iPad I started out with the popular Flipboard app that supposedly sent me the stories I wanted to read, but not really.  I then discovered Zite, and within days, nearly every story they send to the main section is one I want to read.  I get stories from The New York Times, The Economist, and from blogs I never heard of, as well as hundreds of other sources famous or obscure, but they all produce great essays and articles I want to read.  Of course those same sites might produce dozens of other articles too, ones other people want to read but not me, but Zite doesn’t send me those.  This is how Zite beats RSS.

As I read I thumbs up or thumbs down what I like, just like with Pandora and music, and the Zite engine pays attention.  Whatever kinds of algorithms Zite uses, they are very smart.

Sadly, Zite is only for the iPad.  I wished they had a desktop version.  Zite has made me love my iPad, but I spend most of my time at my desk.

I really look forward to reading Zite every day, or even twice a day.  I’m thrilled by the content it finds for me.  It is the best of the best of the internet, suited for my tastes.

There are some obstacles to overcome.  Are there stories I’d also like to read that Zite misses?  For instance Zite introduced me to the website The Millions, a site for book lovers, with two great articles, “(Re)Imagining True Lives: On Historical Fiction” and “The Million Basic Plots.”  While in Zite and reading the article, there’s a button for the Web.  I pushed it and it takes me to The Millions home page where I can read other articles.  And if I find another one I like, I can click the Options button and thumbs up that article too.

Yet, with all the great reading Zite provides I still wonder what I’m missing.  But Zite provided an answer to that too, with “Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to Productivity, sanity” by Jacqui Cheng at ARS Technica.  Cheng makes a good point about living with ignorance.  The reason why RSS is flawed is because it gives me too much to read.  And thinking about all the stuff I might be wanting to read is just as flawed.  Cheng said she went without RSS and just read a few good sites and felt just as informed.  I’ve always wondered if I could pick just one news site, or newspaper, or news magazine, or even news television show, and get all the news I really needed.  But when I think about doing that, I start fearing what I would be missing again.

Zite seems to be a great compromise.  My experiment now will be to see if Zite can be my only source of news by being the best news aggregator.  Zite was recently bought by CNN which is putting a huge scare in us Zite fans, but owners of Zite and CNN swear they will not allow Zite to become a conduit for CNN News.

When I read Zite I use several built-in tools.  It has buttons for Instapaper, Twitter, Facebook, Email and other social functions.  I have a Twitter account that I use like Instapaper.  Most web sites now have icons for tweeting all their articles.  To remember what I’ve read, or want to read, I just tweet it to myself.  But I’m also using Instapaper to compare the two.  I email articles to friends I think would like them, and on rare occasions I’ll send an article to Facebook.

Zite begs for the synergy of all these programs, and it would be cool if Zite eventually incorporated their functionality into Zite.  Zite needs to be incorporated into the browser so it will work from desktops including PC, Mac, and Linux, and it needs to work with smartphones and all tablets.  Instead of saving to Instapaper or Twitter, it should let me mark the articles I want to save to call up within Zite.  And it should allow people to share their Zite reading with other people.  Wouldn’t it be fun to see what your friends or famous people like to read?

Zite has a lot of possibilities, but it needs to get away from the iPad only platform.  Zite is the first app that I feel makes my iPad worth owning.

Now there are some storm clouds on the horizon for apps like Zite, Flipboard, Pulse and others.  They take content from other sites, often removing their ads, and presenting them to you in a reformatted, easy to read format.  This undermines the financial foundation of the original news sites, but it’s well within the link sharing paradigm of the world wide web.

The Internet is killing paper newspapers and magazines.  And paper newspapers and magazines are having a hard time transitioning to the internet and find new financial models of support.  These news aggregators are a threat to them, but if both sides work together it could be a big win-win situation.  Newspapers and magazines have always had the same problem as RSS feeds, they present you will more stories than you want to read.  In our fast paced world that’s only going faster and faster, that’s too much of a time waster.

To see what all these apps look like:

JWH – 9/7/11

A New Kind of Reading: iEssays

What’s the best economic model for finding the absolute best essays to read?

I decided to go paperless with my periodical reading back in February, 2008, and my last magazine subscription (Popular Photography) has finally run out.  At one time I subscribed to over 20 magazines. I love magazines, and I spent six years working in a periodicals department at a university library back in the 1980s. 

At first this effort was to do my part in fighting global warming, but over the last few years I’ve realized that magazines aren’t the most efficient way to read about the world.  Out of a year’s worth of The New Yorker, I might only read 1/20th of the printed pages, and it was probably less.  I now subscribe to The New Yorker on my Kindle, but I don’t even look at every issue, so I’m wasting my money.  I do wish I read each issue cover to cover because it’s a great magazine, but in reality I spend far more time reading on the Internet.  There’s something compelling about jumping from one web site to the next grazing on information.

Long before the Internet was a gleam in its designers’ eyes, magazines and newspapers were the world wide web of information.  Most print magazines and newspapers have a web presence today, and they all compete for eyes and dollars, while still trying not to compete against their own print editions, but I can’t imagine that lasting for many more years.  With ebooks, smartphones and tablets all offering periodicals and news reading apps, how can paper periodicals compete?

I wish I could take a news pill every morning and just know what’s happening around the world, but that’s not possible – yet.  But here’s the modern reality of reading – petabytes of data are being created daily, but we all still live in a 24 hour world, and at most I might spend 7 of my 168 weekly hours keeping up the world by reading short non-fiction essays, and when I’m busy or lazy it’s a lot less.

The Challenge of Keeping Current

We live in exciting times, and this is a happening world, but it is surprising how ill informed we are about what’s going on.  For most of my life I’ve watched the half-hour evening news and then supplemented it with some magazine reading, and figured I was doing pretty good keeping up with current events.  But I realize now that I’m not.  Too much of the evening news on television is worthless.  Are daily stories about natural disasters, politics, and economics really that valuable to keeping up with external reality beyond our tiny lives?

In any 24 hour period, what really are the most worthwhile stories to know about?  Let’s say we spend 60 minutes a day, whether surfing the net, scanning RSS feeds, watching television, reading a newspaper or magazine – what’s the most productive way to spend those 60 minutes in terms of learning about what’s going on in reality?

Generally, we all have a passive attitude towards acquiring news.  We take in whatever’s in front of us, whether it’s the NBC Nightly News or Slashdot.org.  But what if we read with conscious intent?  What if we systematically reviewed data sources ourselves, instead of letting editors at newspapers, magazines and TV shows decide what we need to know?

The Old Way

Before radio and television, people read newspapers.  Your daily paper might present 25 stories and you picked the ones you wanted to read.  With mass broadcasting on radio and TV, news was bundled into shows of 30 or 60 minutes and you just sat through all the stories, even if you really weren’t interested in all of them.  If you wanted to know more you subscribed to magazines and hoped they presented in-depth coverage for stuff you missed from your newspaper, radio and TV.  Before the plague of attention deficit syndrome hit the world, magazines often presented long essays, thousands of words on a topic, offering far more data than you’d get in a one hour documentary.

The Current Way

The Internet publishes thousands, if not millions, of stories every day.  There are many ways of finding stories to read.  You can go to a editor driven sites like Google News, MSN, Slashdot, Engadget, or any of countless other outlets and scan for interesting items to read.  Or you can go to social sites like StumbleUpon or Digg and hope serendipity will bring you a great news surprise.  Or, you can add all your favorite sites to a RSS feed reader and try to manage the internet fire hose of data that way.

With the advent of the tablet computer we now hold a magic magazine that can overcome the limitations of the printing press. 

The Better Way?

Money makes a great editor, in more ways than one.  I guarantee if you go buy copies of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Scientific American, or any of the many top printed periodicals and read the longest articles you’ll get the best bang for you reading time.  These publications pay writers top dollars and there is a kind of survival of the fittest in information quality going on.  However, we still have the problem of subscribing to paper copies, or tediously searching the net for the web editions.  And whether we pay for paper copies or subscribe to digital editions, we’ll buy a lot of content we won’t read.

What we need is the iTunes of essays, iEssays or a Readers Digital Digest.  Articles under 1,000 words should be 49 cents, 1,000-4,999 should be $1, and stories greater than 5,000 words that aren’t considered books, should be $1-3.  If you buy one $5.99-6.99 magazine a week, you’re spending a $1 a day for essays, and I doubt many people would read more than one long essay a day, so these prices are about equal to average magazine reading.  Leave the under 500 word content to free web sites supported by ads.

Picture The New York Times Most Popular section but getting content from hundreds or thousands of magazines, newspapers and web sites.  This is how I read the NY Times, start at this page and only reading the best/most popular articles.

At our iEssays site, we could follow best seller lists set up by topics to quickly find the Hit Essay of the Day from a variety of subject categories.  They can also keep lists for Hits of the Week, Month or Year.  Imagine sitting down with your iPad once a day with the intent of spending 30-60 minutes reading a very high quality article and you’re willing to spend a buck.  This would definitely weed out the crap and silly stories you mind at most social news sites. 

And it’s important that the site not charge a subscription for the whole site.  What we want to do is generate hit essays like iTunes creates hit singles.  It would be important to still read newspaper sites or watch TV news to get a general impression of the news, but if you wanted to really learn something new every day about the world, I think the iEssays would be the best way to go.

Also, to help the survival of the fittest process, I think as part of your purchase you get to send an article to up to five friends, or link it on your blog.  So articles could be promoted up the Hit List by purchase votes, recommendation votes, or link hit votes.  The New York Times allows free reading to its articles if they come in via links.  I think that’s an innovative way to promote stories and still collect payments.

And finally, I think the iEssays should be an app that stores your purchased articles forever in the cloud, so they become part of your digital memory.

Conclusion

I’m not expecting this system to supplant subscription systems.  Most people prefer passive news gathering.  Most people are happy to subscribe to a newspaper or magazine and just skim and read, tossing the issue out when they are done.  But I think there’s enough people like me who are annoyed at buying far more content than we read, and wanting to get the most for our money.  It’s like cable TV plans, spend $60 a month and get 200 channels.  Some people don’t mind channel surfing, but I don’t.  Not only would I like a la cart cable, I think I’d like to buy television by the show.

Unless magazines and newspapers go the way of subscription music, I’d prefer paying by the article rather than the issue.  I pay $4.99 a month to Rdio and get to listen to essentially everything.  I use its social tools and charts to narrow my listening.  But I think by the essay pricing would help me find the best article reading the fastest.

Right now The New York Times charges $20 a month for unlimited tablet access.  That seems way too expensive when compared to what I get from the music business.  If The New York Times also presented content from many major newspapers and magazines, then I might consider a $20 monthly bill, like how I spend for TV and movies through Netflix.  But the NY Times is trying to price their digital newspaper like the old paper copies, and this is different world.  Netflix and Rhapsody are changing content pricing models in people’s minds and I don’t think they will go away.

I think the Rhapsody pricing model is superior to the iTunes pricing model, which is superior to the old CD pricing model.  iTunes sells hits, and I want to buy hit essays.  I don’t want to buy whole papers and read just a handful of its stories.  I want either the Netflix/Rhapsody model which is gigantic piles of content for one low monthly price, and I’d use built in tools to find what I want, or I want the iTunes model, where I buy just the hits. 

When it comes to reading quality essays (or short stories and poems for that matter), I predict the price per song model is superior for quickly finding the best reads.  And ultimately I think more writers and publishers would benefit from this model too.  If I spent $20 a month for The New York Times I doubt I buy any only periodical.  Which is why I can’t make myself spend $20 for one online newspaper.  If they added 20 top magazines to their deal, I would gladly pay $20 a month, but I’d rather pay $1 an article for an even larger pool of hit providers.

The monthly library model like Netflix and Rhapsody is great for music, movies and TV shows if you like to try out lots of different songs or programs.  But reading is different, at least for me.  I have a limited amount of time I spend reading, and I only want the very best stories to read.  It’s like people who prefer iTunes to Rhapsody.  They just want to get a few hits to play and aren’t concerned with trying out one or two dozen new albums a week.  That’s why I think some enterprising Readers Digest wannabes should apply the iTunes model to creating iEssays.  Or if the Best American Series editors came out with a monthly digital issue rather than a series of books once a year.

JWH – 7/17/11

Lightspeed – A new science fiction ezine

Lightspeed is a new online science fiction magazine edited by John Joseph Adams.  Adams was an editor for the print magazine F&SF for nine years, as well as ongoing editor of many exciting theme anthologies, so he has lots of experience looking for good SF stories.  It’s an exciting time for short story writers as they transition to online and ebook markets.  Lightspeed is a good looking site, offering a number of innovative options, including audio versions of stories, as well as the ability to purchase issues in a variety of ebook formats, including Kindle, iBook, ePub and Mobipocket.

Reading Lightspeed online is apparently free, with “Our regular publication schedule each month includes two pieces of original fiction and two fiction reprints, along with four nonfiction articles. Fiction posts on Tuesdays, nonfiction on Thursdays,” but you can buy the entire monthly issue for reading immediately on your ebook reader for $2.99.

I tried to buy the first issue online, with the hope of using PayPal, but aborted my order when asked for my address and no payment method was stated.  Since they take donations via PayPal that might be an option.  It would be nice if that information was at the top of the checkout page.

I’m thinking about buying an iPad, so I’m looking forward to seeing Lightspeed on the beautiful iPad screen.  I also discovered I can buy Lightspeed as a Kindle edition through Amazon and read it on my Kindle Reader for my iPod touch, so I purchased it that way for now.  That took less than 30 seconds, and maybe less than 15.  I wish all ebook magazines were this easy to get, and $2.99 is a very fair price I think.

I’m glad I didn’t buy the first issue online now because I would have had the hassle of downloading it to my computer, importing it into Stanza Desktop, and then going to my iPod touch and copying it over by WiFi.  The Amazon method was much more direct. 

So if you’re an ebook reader, check your different ebook stores for Lightspeed.  It would be helpful if the Lightspeed site had a page about all the various ways to get it on your ebook reader program and device.  This magazine is perfect for the iPhone crowd, and it would be extremely cool to see them combine their print and audio editions into an iPhone App.

I hope Lightspeed plans to distribute with Fictionwise because they are great at selling editions for almost any kind of ebook reading device, and they are a great site for getting all the major science fiction magazines in ebook editions.

Ebook editions might be the future of science fiction magazines.

JWH – 6/6/10

Are You Willing to Pay for News?

If you subscribe to newspapers or magazines then you are already paying for news, so the precise question is:  Are you willing to pay for news on the Internet?  One June 1 The Times (London) is going behind a paywall, and The New York Times is planning on trying yet another online subscription plan next year.  The gold standard of news has always been to read a world-class newspaper.  For years people have gotten used to reading these papers online for free, but now it looks like free days are over.

For most of my life I got my news from the plebian news source, television.  Since the 1990s, Internet has introduced me to the world’s great newspapers and I now realize their value, and I have decided to become an online subscriber.  I just have to decide which paper to marry for my news partner.

The old way of doing things was to subscribe to the local paper and it would include a syndication of state, national and international news stories.  Newspapers were the world wide web before the WWW.  Now, I’m not sure that’s the way to go.  I’m thinking I’d rather have the best news writing, and go with something like The New York Times.  But if everyone thought like that, we’d end up with half a dozen newspapers for the U.S.A.

But then I’m not typical.  I think most people prefer local news.  It’s sad to admit, but I pay zero attention to what goes on in my city and state.  My local paper has a beautiful, and extremely easy to read, free web site, but I don’t read it.  They also offer a modest $10 a month digital edition that’s closer to the looks of a newspaper, but their free site is so nice I can’t imagine even spending that much money.

I think it’s going to be awhile before people pay for local news online, but if The New York Times and the The Times are indicators of the future, will people be willing to pay for a national newspaper?  I don’t think we will know until publishers cut off the free news spigot.  And that’s what the The Times is doing June 1.  The Times will even cut Google off from indexing the paper.  That’s going to be a major experiment. 

So far The New York Times has always kept it’s free web edition going concurrent with any of its paid experimental editions, which have always failed.  I do read the free portions of TimesReader 2.0 that I got when downloading Adobe Reader.  The full edition is $4.62 a week.  $20 a month seems steep compared to what I get from Rhapsody for $10 a month – access to 9 million songs across many major and minor record labels.  The New York Times is preparing a new paid edition for iPad owners, and I think that might be the turning point for switching from paying for printed news to paying for online news.

If I had an iPad I would subscribe to The New York Times, if the web site edition closed down.  I would also consider subscribing to magazines for the iPad.  Again, which magazines I bought would depend if they weren’t available online.  Right now I have little incentive to subscribe to electronic editions of The New Yorker or The Atlantic or Wired because they offer too much content for free.

I used to spend hundreds a dollars a year for magazine subscriptions, but cut them all out because I believe it’s more Earth friendly to read the content online.  And I don’t always expect to get a free lunch, but as long as the content is free I have no incentive to pay either.  I pay Rhapsody $10 a month because I want the music and I don’t want to steal it.  There’s plenty of free legal music on the web, but it’s too much trouble to collect.  For $10 a month I get legal access to 98% of what’s for sale.  I’d rather pay $10 a month to a service like Rhapsody if they distributed legal news and magazines reprints, than make individual subscriptions, but that’s not available.

I’m currently pay Safari Books Online $34 a month for online access to 10,000 plus computer books.  Thus, I’m proving I’m willing to pay for online content.  But I don’t always like the deals being offered.  The online editions of The New Yorker and Scientific American are more expensive than discount offers I get for the paper editions.  No incentive there to subscribe.  I don’t like paying print edition prices for digital editions – it feels like I’m getting ripped off.  Publishers are saving on paper, printing, shipping, distribution, and postal costs, and they aren’t passing any of those savings on to me.

Rupert Murdoch wants people to pay for what they read on the net, at least when they are reading something he’s selling in the analog world.  Now that’s totally against the way the Internet works now.  The reason why the Internet is great is because you can share links.  If some content goes behind paywalls, the Internet will fork into the free and non-free, that which can be linked, and that which can’t.

The Internet is big enough to handle such diversity, but what does that mean at the social level?  We get part of the population reading high quality paid journalism, and the rest will live off of free blog news.  It will also mean those sites that depend on ad revenue will have more readers, those fleeing the paid sites, thus beefing up their financial model.

But think of it this way.  Do you prefer paying for HBO shows, without ads, or watching NBC shows with tons of ads?  That also means, any content I subscribe to on the net better be ad free.  If the TimesSelect 2.0 was $5 a month, instead a week, I’d probably subscribe now if it was totally ad free.  The free, but extremely limited version, has a few ads, but they are still tastefully placed so I can ignore them.  And the amount of great content the New York Times provides with the free edition of the TimesSelect 2.0 also discourages me from paying.

Publishers are going to have a hard time selling content online, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.  It’s better for the economy, and creates more jobs if we pay for what we read.  And we get better written news.  But publishers can’t sell quality content in one place if they also give it away in another just as easy to get to location.

JWH – 3/31/10

Web Sites I Want – Best Essays from Printed Magazines

Even with the social bookmarking sites, reading from the internet is like drinking from a fire hose.  What I’d like to see is highly selective bookmarking site, and in particular, the one I’d love to have most would be Best Essays From Printed Magazines.  The top writing on the net is usually reprinted from the major print magazines, but those essays are overshadowed by the gigantic volume of web journalism.  Hey, I’m a blogger and love getting readers, and I love reading blogs, but the heaviest of the heavy duty essays are still from print magazines.  The cutthroat survival of the fittest in the print magazine industry by its very nature acquires the best writing.

That’s why I’d like a site that helps me find the best essays over 1,000 words.  Adding the length requirement is important because too many magazines have gone to filling up their pages with short web level writing.  Social bookmarking sites like delicious and StumbleUpon are great for snacking on popcorn and candy level reads, but not so yummy if you’re looking for literary steak.  Yes, they will link to long quality essays from printed magazines, but you have to wade through zillions of peanut size stories of questionable value, more akin to Television’s funniest videos in informational nutrition.

No, I want a site that’s very specific and limited.  I’d like an editorial board that selects the Top 100 magazines that publishes their content on the web, and offers a system that lets users bookmark and vote on the best essays they are reading.  Hell, I’d even pay to subscribe to such a site if they got permission to reprint articles that don’t get reprinted on the web.

The web has gotten too big and mangy, so when I want to know something I go to a specific site, mainly Wikipedia.  I’ve given up subscribing to magazines, mainly because I’m against paper for environmental reasons, but also because when I was subscribing to dozens of magazines, all too often I’d only find a good article here and there.  Most of the content was filler, like the web.  I guess I’ve gotten spoiled by the iTunes model – who wants to buy an album when it’s the hit song you want.  This is why I prefer Netflix to cable TV.  We need more ways to cut out the noise.

Here’s are examples of the kind of long essays I’d like to read:

• Publish or Perish (The New Yorker)
• How to Save the News (The Atlantic)
• Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists (Wired)
• A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome (Science)
• Yes, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare (Times Literary Supplement)
• L.A.’s Pot Revolution (Reason)
• Green Giant (The New Yorker)

I guess what I really want is a web version of the Best American Series to be published monthly, instead of the yearly printed volumes they have now.  And if they wanted to make extra money, reprint the monthly web site editions as ebooks for $9.99 for Kindles, Nooks, iPads, etc.

JWH – 5/12/10

The iPad and Screen Evolution

I got to play with an iPad today for the first time.  It was beautiful.  I’m going to have a hard time keeping my resolution to not buy one before the second generation comes out.  I’ve been trying to find a carry around the house computer for years.  I tried a Kindle, iPod touch and a Toshiba netbook.  I sold my Kindle to a bookworm friend, and my other two devices just sit around losing battery charge.  I use each occasionally, but they have the wrong size screens.

I liked the Kindle for reading fiction, but I wanted something to read electronic magazines, RSS feeds and the Internet while reclined in my La-Z-Boy.  The iPod touch lets me read stuff the Kindle didn’t plus my Kindle fiction, but the screen is too small.  I installed several ebook reader programs on my netbook, but 10.1” landscape screen is all wrong.  Seeing the 9.7” inch portrait screen of the iPad today convinced me it was near perfect for electronic magazines, RSS feeds and Internet reading, and probably for fiction too.  It was heavier than I expected, and that might be a drawback.  But it was damn close to what I want.

The iPad should do a lot to eliminate paper, which is one of my environmental goals.  The iPad also well illustrates the role and purpose of the computer screen.  The small screen on the iPhone/iPod touch is perfect for carrying around all the time.  The interface is tuned to it’s 3.5” screen.  iPhone apps that aren’t rewritten for the 9.7” iPad screen will miss their mark.  Putting Windows 7 on a 10.1” netbook screen just isn’t right either.  Tiny desktop applications don’t cut it, they need to be redesigned to the screen real estate.

For example, Windows Media Center works great on my 52” television screen.  It’s an application designed to work on a TV screen with viewers across the room.  It doesn’t need a keyboard.   Using regular Windows apps on my big TV is clunky.  I can make browsing OK with IE 8 by using the Zoom magnification, so I can play music and read Engadget or Slashdot from the couch, but some pages like Pandora just doesn’t resize or work well on the big screen.

It would be damn cool if Pandora, Rhapsody and Lala all were rewritten to run inside of Windows Media Center.  In fact, it would be extremely neat if there was a version of IE for Windows Media Player so I could browse the web with just a clicker.  It would need a virtual keyboard like the iPad/iPhone, but that’s doable.

Back in the 1990s pundits started talking about digital convergence.  They expected TVs and computers to merge, and that’s rapidly happening, but I don’t think they planned for giant screen TVs.  Nor did they expect the convergence with telephones, GPSes and books, or even game machines.  Now it’s all a matter of fitting the task to the screen size:

Screen Size	Device	Best Use
1-2”	MP3	Music Audiobooks Voice Recording
2-4”	Phone Camera Video Cam Portable Game	Smartphone GPS Photography Videography Games
5-6”	Ebook	Fiction
9-11”	Tablet	Nonfiction Magazines RSS feeds Photos Games
10-16”	Netbook Notebook	Work on the go
18-24”	Desktop	Work at the desk
26-60”	Television	TV Movies Music Home video Internet TV
> 60”	Projector	Lectures Education

You can watch video on all these screen sizes, and even use all of them with computer applications or games.  Telephone features like video conferencing, Skype and web cams have moved to the various screen sizes.  I think the iPad has been in development since before the advent of netbooks, and I bet Steve Jobs was sick to see them succeed because that 9-11” screen size was territory ripe for exploitation.  I tend to think tablets will win out in that form factor and 12-13” will become the ultimate netbook size for extreme road warriors who want to type on the go, while 16” will be the common size for notebooks.  I expect 24” to become the ultimate size for desktop machines, although I’ve discovered I like having two monitors at work, one in portrait and the other in landscape.

Now, is there room for a new form factor and unique applications?  I don’t know.  Will the future just be ones of refining these screen territories?  And will there be some repositioning of functions?  Do you need a smartphone if you carry around an iPad?  Would a dumb phone be good enough?  Some people like everything on one device, like an iPhone, but I prefer the right tool for the job.  The iPod Nano is perfect for audio books.  They are harder to use on the iPhone.  Time will tell how everything shakes out, but I think screen size will be the factor that will determine the ultimate use of each device.

JWH – 4/8/10