Seasonal sentiments.

OK, OK, Have It Your Way
All of us who work at SLATE continue to hear from friends and acquaintances who say they love the magazine--or at least, they think they might love it--but they refuse to read from a computer screen. Nor can they deal with the downloadable print-out file or the e-mail delivery, which we've tried our darnedest to make as easy as possible, and which we tout without mercy in this department week after week. They want their magazine printed on paper--and folded and stapled, to boot. They want it delivered to them by the post office. They don't give a hoot about links and multimedia, and they aren't satisfied with the monthly highlights edition--SLATE ON PAPER--that we've been offering for the past few months. What can you do with such people? We took this question to Bill Gates, who had his usual three-word recommendation. ("But I don't want to interfere, of course," he humbly added.) We, however, have chosen a different strategy: Give the people what they want.
So, starting in January, we will offer a weekly mailed edition of SLATE. It will be more or less identical to the Friday print-out edition, which is also the edition we e-mail to readers. But it will be printed, stapled, and folded, just like a grown-up magazine, and it will then be entrusted to the tender mercies of the U.S. Postal Service. (To minimize delivery time, we will print and "drop" at three locations across the country.)
The price is $70 a year, which is in the range of what weekly print magazines cost. Of course, that's a bit more than the $19.95 a year SLATE online will cost (beginning in February)--and SLATE online subscriptions will include free e-mail delivery and/or download of the print-out edition. But paper, printing, and postage cost money. To subscribe to the new weekly paper edition of SLATE, please call 800-555-4995. Operators are standing by (we hope). And it makes a great last-minute Christmas present!
SLATE ON PAPER, our monthly printed highlights edition, will cease publication with the January issue. Subscribers will get the weekly edition instead, at no additional charge during the period of their initial subscription. The new weekly printed SLATE will not be available at Starbucks or on newsstands, at least for now. But we hope that our various options--the online version, the offline reading version through FreeLoader, the daily print-out edition, the weekly e-mail delivery, and now the weekly mailed paper edition--will give anyone who wants SLATE a way to get SLATE.

--Michael Kinsley