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I would pay ___ monthly for a good online newspaper/magazine
| 13396 votes / 39% |
| 5944 votes / 17% |
| 3329 votes / 9% |
| 2720 votes / 8% |
| 544 votes / 1% |
| 878 votes / 2% |
| 909 votes / 2% |
| 5882 votes / 17% |
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- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
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Good online content? (Score:5, Interesting)
Good online content can be pretty hard to find. I already pay $20 per month for my subscription to the New York Times on my Kindle.
That isn't quite the same as paying for access to their website, but it is an online version, insofar as it is not a physical copy of the paper.
FWIW I am a believer that if you don't pay for news, then the newspapers will go under.
And no, I don't think citizen reporting and blogs from some college student are ever going to replace serious journalism.
I don't really care if a rock band loses out on revenues from internet piracy, but newspapers are the grease that make democracy work.
I say pay them $20 per month, same as NYT, and if they can't survive on that, given no distribution costs, then they need to rethink their business models.
Ads? (Score:4, Interesting)
It depends on the value of the publication (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually don't have a problem with paying ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Stratfor? (Score:3, Interesting)
Has anyone here heard of Stratfor? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratfor [wikipedia.org]
Their analysis costs like $320 a year (or like $40 a month if you don't buy the full year at a time). It includes first-hand accounts and full strategic analysis of international events, like the Mumbai attacks, the Mexican cartel violence, and the new TSA groping procedures. Today's free-to-non-members article is about the strategic implications of Egypt destroying churches. Last week's one was about the real nuts/bolts of START: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20101227-making-sense-start-debate [stratfor.com]. Another good recent article was about the actual balance of power shifts that the European economic crisis is causing: http://www.stratfor.com/content/europes-new-plan [stratfor.com]
I know the cost is outrageous. But it's hands down the best "reporting" I've ever seen. It's unbiased (Seriously. It really IS unbiased. I didn't even think that was possible until I subscribed...), and most of the reporting is done by ex-military or ex-intelligence agents.
I think my answer to the poll is that I'm willing to pay >$10 but I'll probably let my subscription run out and then just get their free weekly emails instead. I never thought I'd have TOO much access to intelligent, informed, timely, accurate, well written information. I hate to sound like a fanboy or a spammer for them, but their briefs really are that good.
The Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyhow, coming from that background I remember Usenet, which actually had some intelligent conversations going on up into the early 1990s - even in silly groups like alt.religion.kibology. Before AIM and Facebook and Twitter were popular, people would go on IRC channels, and you could get technical help, or even sense the rhythm of the community - unlike Usenet, this is not totally dead yet, with networks like Freenode still performing a good job.
I recall fondly these distributed networks where one could often find much intelligent discussion. It was all free as well - people, often younger people, would fall over themselves trying to get one of their servers onto EFnet or one of the other IRC networks.
Corporate domination and expansion has killed much of this. Nowadays the communal IRC channel has made way for the individualized Facebook, or even more individualized AIM private message. The distributed Usenet q&a groups are now replaced with client/server web sites. Of course, these things which belonged to a sort of commons are now filtered through, controlled and owned by corporations. The intelligence level has dropped a lot. Nowadays the idea of a distributed, non-corporate network is associated with what the MafiAA call "piracy", with Limewire forced to close, with Bittorrent sites under attack. Sites like Craigslist, which hold onto the old values to some extent, are under attack as headline-seeking attorney generals attack men and women who seek to privately exchange one's money for another's carnal labor. I'm sure if Usenet or IRC were developed today, the RIAA/MPAA would jump on them even more than they have as "tools for piracy", or by attorney generals as tools for prostitution, pornography while they're on a hysterical anti-sex crusade, which often has the side effect of knocking out the non-prurient parts of these networks as well.
I bemoan how the Internet has lost a lot of this culture, I'll leave it to others to bemoan how with the Internet propaganda rags like Time Magazine are not able to make the big bucks pushing advertisements and propaganda to the masses any more.