A special message (and a fantastic bargain) from the editor of Slate.

Be the First on Your Block

As regular Slate readers probably know by now, Slate will soon become a paid site. Most editorial content, all e-mail deliveries, and use of "The Compost" and "The Fray" will be available only to paying subscribers. Today we announce the details--including a bargain for folks who sign up early.

OK, here's the deal. "Payday" is Monday, March 9. The site will remain free until then, but you can sign up for subscriptions starting today. The introductory price is $19.95 a year (and yes, of course, the year starts March 9 even if you sign up early). Subscribers who sign up before March 9 will not only enjoy uninterrupted access and e-mail deliveries but also be guaranteed that $19.95 annual rate for the life of their subscriptions. (The lifetime guarantee extends to clones of early subscribers.) Payment can be made by credit card online, toll-free telephone, fax, or check. (For members of the Microsoft Network, a Slate subscription is included in your membership fee. If you belong to MSN, just follow the directions to register.)

If you want to sign up now and skip the rest of this hard sell, click here. Otherwise, read on.

When you subscribe, you even get a lovely gift from the people who think up this sort of thing: your choice of a Slate logo umbrella (itself a $19.95 value, tested in authentic Seattle rain) or a Microsoft Encarta Virtual Globe (estimated retail value $54.95). Is that a deal, or what? If these grotesque bribes have pushed you over the top, waste no more time and click here to subscribe. Otherwise, read on.

Seriously for a moment, we have tried to be as forthright as possible about our intention to ask readers to share the cost of publishing Slate and our reasons for doing so. Here's part of our very first "Readme" column, which appeared in June 1996:

We intend to charge $19.95 a year for Slate. That is far less than the cost of equivalent print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95 ... is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to paying. 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. ...

And we want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of Slate's main goals is to demonstrate, if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like Slate depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy.

(We probably should have found a better term than "serious journalism" in this passage. Some forms of serious journalism may well be supportable on the Web through advertising alone--though none has succeeded so far. For the entire first Readme, click here.)

For more details on our decision to go paid--including the question of why Bill Gates can't just pick up the tab--click here. For a discussion of Slate's relationship to (what's it called again? ... oh yeah ...) the Microsoft Corp., click here.