I just figured out what my New York Times and Washington Post subscriptions have been costing me:
Times: $325 a year.
Post: $120 a year.
[Calculating.]
That’s $445 a year. I will be giving a chunk of that sum to The Guardian.
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Zounds
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
comments: 8
As an academic, did you ever get discount subscriptions? In the entertainment world, our accountants always had us write off everything from televisions, to cable tv/internet to news and magazine subscriptions. But subscriptions were usually discounted anyway. I would just call up the subscription department, explain I worked in media and get Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The Economist for about $12-18 per year. The Times didn't do that, so back in my 20s Id take a super low one-year low deal over the phone, cancel when full-price kicked-in, then wait for them to call me with another sweet deal.
Point is, I became super entitled about getting free/cheap news. I finally canceled my subscription mid-pandemic, but still read their articles bc, unlike the Post, they have not blocked RSS readers from fetching the entire text. I use the Inoreader app to get all my feeds, including this one. Some feeds, including the Times, will show the first few paragraphs, but if you swipe down, it fetches the entire article. The Post has blocked this, but so far the NYT has not.
I subscribed to both papers after retiring. For the discount, I know that one or the other or both require an ID to verify that you’re a current faculty member, so I’m out of luck there. The Times can be now had for free via my school, but with my academic e-mail address already in the Times system, I’m not sure I’d be eligible for a free account. I plan to use archive.is in a pinch if I need to see, say, an obit for a musician or writer.
How the heck do you read individual Times articles via RSS? Inquiring minds want to know!
I used Feedly for many years, but then it got a little buggy and I found Inoreader, which will attempt to fetch the text of the article when you swipe down even if it is only displaying the headline and sub. A few publications, like The Post and subscriber Substack, block this but smostfar the Times has not.
(Ugh, stupid publish button is terrible on phones)
As I was saying, most sites don't prohibit this and so far, The Times hasn't blocked it.
I just tried adding nytimes.com to NetNewsWire and was surprised to see twenty-odd articles show up, each with just a line of text. I clicked through and read one, but after that, the subscription gadget rose from the bottom of the page and covered all. But that’s okay — I really don’t need to read what Maggie Haberman has to say about Trump’s Garden party.
Just tried inoreader and found only a photo (repeated) for each article. But then I clicked on the coffeecup and a whole article appeared. I wonder how the Times allows it.
I get the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ free through a special subscription link through my campus library account with my faculty ID. I have to renew every year, but it's a simple 2-click process. And then my logins work on the apps on both Android and iOS/iPadOS, too.
That’s a generous school.
Post a Comment