I would pay ___ monthly for a good online newspaper/magazine

...I was going to make some complaint / argument for $0. But then I remembered I tossed Slashdot a few bucks a while back.
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  To maintain complete accuracy in this poll, I recommend my vote be removed immediately. Thanks.

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.

I give money (to Kindle -- I know, I know) for The New Yorker, and for Barron's. I don't subscribe to any newspaper because there isn't one offered that I want to read.

I actually PREFER the Kindle version of these to the printed version. They are nothing but words. I like words. I don't have to look at pointless pictures, page my way through advertisements, or discover that the article I'm reading is "continued on page 137" (which I hate). The cartoons from The New Yorker are included in their own section, which is a bonus.

I've subscribed to others on a trial basis, and also found them worthwhile (but there's only so much time in the day). Foreign Affairs is a good one (although it's only six issues a year).

Not everything can (or should) be read in this format. Sometimes Barron's graphs are a bit rough, but I'm used to it. Words are good.

I've been a subscriber for 25+ years. If you subscribe, the online copy comes for free.

I like the paper edition, because I can take it into the bathtub. Something I would not do with my SchtinkPad.

I haven't seen a magazine worth subscribing to since Byte's hayday. Even though they're free, I couldn't be bothered surfing to most of the magazine sites that are already available.

Some of the magazine articles linked to from Slashdot stories are barely English, others are so biased and pre-decided it's not even funny. Pay for such content? Surely you jest!

I subscribe to a monthly newsletter [thelurioreport.com].. I guess you could say the guy's idea's intrigued me.

Well, I already pay more for some scientific journals online. So obviously the right content is worth more than that to me.

For general interest, I wouldn't currently pay because plenty of good quality content is free. And if I'm paying (such as for the Economist) I prefer the print version, where I find it easier to read multiple medium length articles.

I still buy books in preference to on-line or pdf material, for me, electronic versions just arn't the same.

Oh, yeah? But I voted for zero!

Golly! I'm a-hopin' these /. folks ain't a-writing code for them thar votin' machines!

I have a subscription to The Economist paper magazine for ages now which entitles me to access restricted content on the website for free and yet I almost never use the website. Why ...

- The paper magazine is small enough and practical enough to take anywhere I feel like reading it.
- It's very easy on your eyes to read it.
- It's surprisingly unlikelly for me to damage the paper magazine in a way that makes the content unrecoverable.
- If somehow I loose or damage my paper magazine I don't really care that much - it's not as if it's an expensive device with my whole book collection attached to it.
- I can use it anywhere: it works outside network coverage and will not run out of batteries.

And the best thing is that I can still use the website if I want to.

Don't quite see the point of subscribing for online content only when it's not all that cheaper compared to paper+online and I loose a lot of convenience.

Why bother reading tedious articles when I can get local and international news from radio?

Heck, I can work AND listen to the radio at the same time.

It needs to be UNENCRYPTED PDF (or better yet Epub) and cost LESS than a print magazine.

Problem is all magazines out there are greedy and expect people to happily pay newsstand price for a digital copy that is locked and really not readable on any devices.

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.

Seriously: what's the difference between a newspaper/magazine vs. website other than media the content is displayed upon, frequency of updates, and paid access?

I picked "I don't know what those words mean" because, well, given the peculiar juxtaposition I'm not sure I/we really know. People may have a natural reaction to the terms, and an impulsive response to the question, but upon reflection it seems either a matter of a tautology or a "does a fish need a bicycle" - either pointless or nonsensical.

My initial response is $0, because I don't understand why I'm paying ANYTHING for a newspaper or magazine that includes advertising. The cost of a traditional print newspaper subscription is supposed to cover the distribution costs -- that is, to pay the carrier. Advertising pays for everything else. In the case of a web version, there is no carrier, and web-hosting costs are tiny in comparison to traditional distribution costs.

OTOH, I would pay several dollars per month for a newspaper/magazine subscription that did NOT have advertising.

We all want everything online to be free.

Then, we all install ad-blocker in firefox so we aren't annoyed by the over-obtrusive ads required to keep a decent site free.

Then, we bitch and moan when our favorite site either (a) starts pumping out crap because they had to get rid of all their decent editors or (b) starts charging for content that we used to get for free.

I don't go to any particular news site, I go to aggregators like slashdot and google news. I read news from 10s of different sources a day and then perhaps 10s of different sources the next day. I don't think the subscription model works well for this usage pattern and I think my usage pattern is probably fairly common.

As a payer of the licence fee from which the BBC receives its funding, I am already paying for excellent online content - include news and magazine articles. I don't know if this counts as me paying for online news though, since I am not choosing to pay for the online news in particular. Plus, since since the licence fee only applies to people that sometimes watch television programmes as they are broadcast, if you don't fit into that category, you are still entitled to the BBC's online news - which would then be free.

It's been hard enough for me to get used to paying for electronic versions of novels. At least they give something new; the newspapers and magazines often just echo what other people on the internet are saying.

I know, if you don't patronize these services they'll go out of business. But I can't fund every industry. Given a choice between paying for fiction or news, I'll choose fiction. News is depressing.

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.

There is exactly one website I have ever found to be worth paying access for (and no, it's not porn, I get all of that I want for free). Sorry, newspaper and magazine guys, your subscription model is dead, dead, dead. And if you don't adapt, so is your newspaper/magazine.

I love LWN. I've been a subscriber for years, and I'm currently at the "Professional" level of about $7 a month. I like the main page, but I LOVE the kernel page. Ever since that got stopped summing up kernel discussions (don't remember the list name) they've been my connection to watching Linux develop.

I also love Ars Technica, and I'm a subscriber there too. Don't remember for how much. That turns off the ads (good, but I already get rid of the annoying ones with FlashBlock) and automatically enters me into their contests. How can you beat the in-dept architecture coverage and great articles?

I've been reading both for years and they both do such a great job, they deserve my support. There are a lot of sites/blogs I read daily but wouldn't pay for. I've considered paying for /., but the ads don't bother me much and I really don't like the "per pageview" thing, I'd much prefer a flat rate (*hint hint*).