A subscription to the New York Times costs $769.60 per year. A good chunk of that is printing and delivery costs for something I don't want anyway: a giant stack of physical paper. On top of the odd environmental disconnect of shipping a whole tree's worth of paper to each individual customer in tiny chunks every day over a year, there's the disconnect of customers paying to have advertising delivered to them.<p>How they expect people to pay for that in a world where I can read their best articles online for free is totally beyond me.<p>What I would like to see is:<p>- An iPad version of the full paper (not just the selections they have now).<p>- No advertising.<p>- A price reflective of the reduced printing and delivery costs. I don't want to subsidize the physical paper subscriptions of other people.<p>- Fast search and access to the archives from within the iPad app.<p>Then again, as long as the web site remains free (although hobbled by advertising and splitting articles across pages), I doubt the iPad app would get much traction. You never know though.<p>Also, with all that said, I don't live in New York. For my local paper (the San Francisco Chronicle) to warrant me subscribing, they'd need to start doing some real journalism. For example, they could look at the city and state government. In a budget crisis, you'd think there would be plenty of material to use. The milquetoast reporting they currently practice isn't worth any of my money.
I subscribed to the San Jose Mercury News once because some kid came door to door signing people up as a fundraiser. I gave in because his pitch was so self aware: "Hey man, I know nobody wants the paper, but would you still mind helping me out?"<p>I did, for $20, and it was an obnoxious several months waiting for the paper to stop. I had twice as much crap to throw away every week as usual, and I didn't read the paper once.<p>The worst part is that now every newspaper in the bay area has me on their list of people-who-might-buy-a-paper and calls me every two weeks trying to get me to subscribe. When they call I tell them that I'd be happy to subscribe to support the paper if they can guarantee me that I'll never _ever_ receive a physical newspaper. So far none have been able to.
I think 25 is a pretty low limit.<p>This is all anecdotal, but I know probably a few hundred people in the 21-30 age bracket, and I can only think of three who get a paper (the WSJ in every case) delivered daily. There are a few more who will grab a daily during a lunch break, but the vast majority of people I know who read a paper will only read the free ones. (Here in Philadelphia we have three major free ones--a daily and two weeklies.)<p>A few months back I tried to watch the ABC news podcast at lunch every day to make sure I wasn't missing any important news. I kept it up for a few weeks, but gave up when I realized only about 10% of the running time covered stories I hadn't already consumed online before even the episode's original airtime. Since I don't read a daily, I don't know if that's the case for them, but I have a feeling that between Google Reader and Twitter I have a better tailored, more complete picture of the world than I can get could from one daily source.
I'm 20, and I get the Guardian and the Financial Times (in the UK) every day. I don't actually subscribe to them, rather buy them from the shop each day, but that's just because my job takes me away from home regularly (in 2009 I spent 170/365 days at various events around the world) so subscribing would just be a waste for me.<p>I do have subscriptions to two weekly magazines (on news), a biweekly magazine (satirical/news) and four monthly magazines (tech & lifestyle).<p>An interesting note on the subject of magazines: PricewaterhouseCoopers released their "Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2010-2014" report a few days ago, and their view on magazine sales is:<p>"Total global spending on consumer magazines fell by 10.6 percent in 2009. We project an additional 2.7 per cent decrease in 2010, a flat market in 2011, and modest growth during 2012-14. As a result, spending will total $74 billion in 2014, up 0.7 percent compounded annually from $71.5 billion in 2009."
I'm waay past 25, but I can't see subscribing to a print paper any more. I had a WSJ subscription at one point in my life, could almost see doing that again, but it doesn't seem to have the value it once had.<p>I live in LA, I buy the LA Times sometimes, and I think it's a good paper that's gotten better by focusing more on local news than national or world stories. I don't want a subscription just because of the hassle of the dealing with it physically every day.<p>I've had a subscription to The Economist running for years, and it is very much worth having for physical perusing. I have subscribed to Nature on and off over the years, and would consider it again.<p>I have an electronic subscription to Variety, the Hollywood trade daily. I would go physical if I had an office to deliver it to.
I turned 25 two days ago, but I have a newspaper subscription here I share with my roommates. We also get a weekly magazine, something like TIME magazine. Also I know a number of people in the same demographic, with the same model.<p>This is in Germany, don't know if that makes a difference.
Basically, newspapers and magazines have the same problem as CDs: you have to buy a bunch of crap in order to get the one or two bits that you actually like.<p>I suspect that ones that serve a focused niche will continue to survive, just not at the size they've been used to.
I'm 29 and I've never subscribed to a paper.<p>Even if the only way to get news was to pay for it, I'd pay for a digital subscription of some kind before I'd ever consider subscribing to a paper. Newspapers are wasteful, messy, and of course unwieldy. Annoying to handle and laid out so articles are always split up randomly across multiple huge, floppy pages.<p>Or I can have the convenience of being able to read the news anywhere, have each article be contiguous and usually on one page, never have to throw anything away, etc. The fact that I can get my news for free digitally is a bonus, really.
I'm mid-fifties and grew up reading every paper I could get me hands on, along with all the major newsweeklies. That was then. Now some days my local newspaper is handing out free sample copies on the street and most times I couldn't be bothered. Newspaper? It's over for me.
I recently looked into subscribing to the International Herald. It just costs way too much for a poor student like me. Especially when I'm not entirely sure if I'll manage to read it and if I like the content. But I'll probably subscribe when I get a steady income.
Subscriptions made buying papers more convenient and often cheaper (though not always, weirdly!). No more trips to newsagent in the rain to find they have sold out etc etc. The net has more or less trounced them in the convenience stakes. Now arranging a sub and waiting for the postman to arrive is more of a hassle than firing up a browser whenever I want to catch up.<p>I still buy newspapers - maybe more than I used to, but a subscription these days just seems a bit pointless far as I'm concerned. Not only that, but the quality of free gifts for signing up has fallen to a shocking, almost insulting, level!<p>Sent from my iDevice so please forgive the fresh he'll that is my auto-spelling.
There's just so many ways to consume information these days, that physical newspapers seem to be the least effective medium at this point. I subscribe to the NYT on my Kindle and haven't looked back.<p>They aren't doing themselves any favors by sticking with the large paper format either. Trying to read a newspaper in any sort of tight quarters like an airplane is a fools errand. I'm curious if they've ever considered making newspapers magazine sized.
I used to subscribe to one last year, but I just wasn't reading the whole thing. It was a pain to go online and find out more information, to participate in any discussions or to lookup words or terms I didn't know. Then I got Google Reader and canceled that subscription. Never going back. (under 25)
My friend is getting his Bachelors in Business and in one of his classes his professor recommended that everyone subscribe to the wall street journal. He did but he has never picked one up we have a nice stack by our shoes.
I find reading newspapers to be a waste of time, I much rather just listen to pure news on the radio, news that has no opinion. It just says "10 killed in Hurricane", "BP tried to stop the leak this way, and it fauled, will try method X tommrow"<p>Thats all I really care about. I don't need to be fed opinion, especially not social liberal ramblings from the NYT or WSJ. If I want to know more about something, I read a book on the matter.