Thursday, December 18, 1997

Microsoft's online magazine to charge subscriptions in 1998

NEW YORK (AP) -- Slate, Microsoft Corp.'s magazine on the World Wide Web, will begin charging for subscriptions early next year, its publisher said Wednesday.

Publisher Rogers Weed said neither the price nor the timing of the move had been determined, but with about 140,000 readers, it was finally feasible to charge subscription fees.

It's been stop-and-go for Slate when it comes to charging readers.

Slate debuted in June 1996 with Michael Kinsley of The New Republic as editor and a promise to bill readers $19.95 for a year's subscription. In his introductory column, Kinsley wrote: "We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting."

But billing problems and readers' grumblings caused Slate to "chicken out" as Kinsley said early this year. In a February column, the editor wrote:

"Maybe in the future, when the Web is commonplace, people will happily pay for access to premium sites. ... Right now, though, there are too many people who are too damned cheap ... er, we mean ... too engaged by the novelty of the medium to feel the need to pay extra for specific content."

In his latest column, however, Kinsley crowed about 140,000 readers, a threefold increase in circulation from a year ago when subscriptions first were being considered.

Slate is the second largest e-zine on the Web, after HotWired, a publication from Wired Ventures Inc. HotWired, with about 800,000 registered members, does not charge for subscriptions and has no plans to charge in the future, said spokesman Andrew de Vries.