“I’d spent tens of thousands of hours consuming the news. I asked myself two questions: do you understand the world better now? And do you make better decisions? The answer in both cases was no.”

—Rob Wijnberg

Or, if you can’t quit completely, how about this suggestion from Dave Winer?

Instead of making us subscribe to a multitude of news sources for paywall access, why not let us pay by the article?

The best price for a NY Times online subscription is currently $8/month. For the Washington Post, it’s a bit under $2.50/month if you get a year. The Atlantic is about ​$4.15/month if you buy a year’s subscription at ​$50.

Not bad individually, but it starts to add up, especially if you add in some conservative outlets for balance. (Haha, just kidding.)

If want to read for more depth, literary and review magazines are even more expensive. The New York Review of Books is $80.00 for 20 issues, which is about half a year.

The N.Y.T. could allow an individual without an account to purchase access to a particular article for say, $1.00. Then they could remind that person that a subscription would be a better value once they reach a certain threshold.

I would get a prompt from the N.Y.T. saying something like “Your individual article purchases are on track to make buying a subscription a better value. Would you like to purchase a subscription?”

What do you think?