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The online magazine Tekka recently caught my interest. It covers topics that are near and dear to me: new media, software, narrative... In particular, I was interested in reading Bill Bly's article on "artifactual fiction":
'By "artifactual" I mean fiction made up not of simple narration but of objects, each of which has a story (it could be a document, but could as well be a photograph, a map, a song). The object may tell its story itself (as would happen with, say, a journal entry), or the object may have to be "read" -- analyzed, dissected, contemplated, then related to other artifacts in the vicinity -- before its significance can become clear, its story understood.' But I'm put off by the registration fee—$50 is pretty steep for a year's worth of access to an online magazine. "Writers have to eat," says the site, and I know that as much as anyone. I have no serious qualms about charging for content—even charging a lot for content—but if you're going to do it, you should at least do it right.
The prime reason I'm resistant to coughing up the $50 is because there's no good way to assess the quality of what I'm paying for. If Tekka were an actual, physical magazine, I could go to a bookstore and pick up an issue, sampling the content for a low-cost, one-time investment. If I liked it, and thought that I might be interested in reading it regularly, then I'd be much more likely to put out the money for a subscription (especially if it would result in a savings over the newsstand price). Tekka isn't a physical magazine, but there are simple ways that they could mimic this model. They could make some articles available to the casual browser. Say, one feature per issue. Or just the book reviews. Or just the back issues. (Instead, they offer the first couple hundred words of each article—but the real "meat" of an article—what I most need to assess in order to make an assessment of quality—is rarely, if ever, found in an article's introductory passages.)
Perhaps they could emulate the "newsstand factor" most faithfully by allowing people to purchase a pass to all the articles in one issue. There are going to be four issues of Tekka in 2003: I'd happily pay $12.50 to read the one with the "artifactual fiction" article in it.
If we step outside of the "subscription paradigm" and the "newsstand paradigm" and think clearly about the qualities of data online, we can find other solutions as well. I've never bought a paid subscription to anything online—but I've bought individual articles online on several occasions. My most recent purchase was from the Chicago Reader archive, which charges $1.95 to $3.95 for an article (depending on length), a non-prohibitive amount. Data in an archive is, by its very nature, fragmented, nonlinear, and hypertextual—you can sell it piece-by-piece just as easily as you can sell full access to it. (Perhaps the back-end programming is trickier, but a magazine about "creating beautiful software" should be able to find someone who can manage this problem.) Our engagement with information on the Web is often context-specific, noncommittal, promiscuous, and specialized—given these truths it just makes sense to make your articles available individually, at an easily-absorbable cost, rather than asking, up-front, for a full year of pricey committment.
I'd expect the people who are thinking critically and intelligently about new media to be the ones who understand that the most.
Thursday, August 28, 2003
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