Pay-Per-News and Views: Salon.com

By Jonathan Berohn

The first thing you need to know about Salon.com is that it's a pay-per-view site. Once you get past that, there's actually quite a lot of interesting content to recommend Salon. They follow the wire services so you can stay up to date on the news of the world.

They cover major stories in depth, and their offer a lot of interesting and knowledgeable columnists that can inform, enlighten and entertain you about everything from politics and international affairs to movies and video games. By the way, have I mentioned that it's a pay-per-view site?

Salon vs. the Competition

There in a nutshell is the problem with Salon. Maybe the New York Times is a bit stuffy for you. Maybe you find Fox news a bit hokey. Maybe you even think Slate isn't quite as hip as it pretends to be. Guess what, though? They're all free. OK-maybe I'm not being quite fair to Salon. They do give you a way to view content free through the almost ingenious but somehow heavy handed "Free Day Pass." To take advantage of the Free Day Pass you have to sit through a Verizon commercial. Then you can read Salon's features to your heart's content for 8 hours.

A Nice Deal, but.

Again, to be fair, if you do chose to subscribe to Salon-and subscriptions go for 35.00 annually-you get something of a deal. Along with your unlimited access to Salon, you get a year's subscription to 3 hard copy magazines-Wired, National Geographic, and US News and World Report. For 35 bucks that seems like a decent deal, but it also exposes the flaw with Salon. If I'm reading these magazines, why do I need Salon?

Sure, if I already read these magazines I might as well subscribe through Salon for the deal, but if I don't, why not just buy a magazine I do read and get my internet content from the numerous out standing and FREE sites out there? Salon's counting on you being too lazy to find the content for yourself, but then you probably won't find Salon in the first place-quite a quandary there for their marketing people I would presume.

All in all, since they're aiming at the same audience who can find its news from the New York Times, get its hip columnists from Slate, and their high tech reading virtually anywhere, Salon has an uphill battle to carve out its readership niche. it certainly won't be doing it with my money.