silverorange stuff

When the site first announced it was moving to a subscription model, I had mixed feelings. On one hand, the ideal of moving content that was freely accessible on the web behind a for-pay wall seemed objectionable. On the other hand, I was so pleased with the quality and consistency of the journalism and writing that I wanted to support the site. I felt I owed them for all of the great articles I had read.

Salon made some smart decisions in implementing the for-pay subscriptions. Lots of content is still available for free on the site, and for-pay articles still display a short informational page for those without a subscription. This may be frustrating for those without a subscription, but it is a good promotion for Salon and more importantly, it means that even though the for-pay articles are not freely available, they do have a “home” on the web. Google can index them (or part of them), and webloggers have somewhere to link when discussing them.

As for the other benefits of the Salon.com subscription, like music and audio books, I haven’t really made use of these. Perhaps if I had a portable audio player I might use the audio books, but even then there are better sources online for great audio material. These side-benefits don’t detract from the subscription, but I could take them or leave them. It’s the articles I’m paying for.

That said, as of this writing, new subscriptions are eligible for free magazine subscriptions, including Wired magazine. This is almost worth the price of the subscription if you were going to pay for Wired anyhow. Do note that some of the magazine subscription offers are limited to U.S. customers (I couldn’t get Wired here in Canada, for example, but they do offer some fine Canadian alternatives).

While I realize this is inevitable for Salon, and they handle it as well as possible, you are adding another login to your life. Your login is remembered with cookies, but if you change browsers or use another computer, you have to log in. Again, I know there isn’t anything Salon can do about this, but it can be a bother.

The benefit of access to the Premium articles has been enough to keep me paying for two years. I will probably renew in 2005 as well. If you subscribe or not, anyone has access to the best feature of Salon.com - the front page feature photos and illustrations.