US News’s Doomed Subscription PDF

Jeff has the news today that US News is launching a $19.95-per-year weekly PDF. The decision comes almost exactly ten years after Slate went free, after a disastrous attempt to charge $19.95 a year for its content:

Bill Bass, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said that the issue was one of supply and demand. ”Last year, I said this was the dumbest thing I had ever heard,” he said. ”There is so much free content on the Web that if you try and charge for it people won’t go to you. There is too much substitutable content.”

In the past decade, of course, the amount of free content on the web has increased exponentially, especially when it comes to the "politics and policy" beat of the new PDF.

But US News isn’t simply adopting the failed Slate model of 1998. It’s also adopting the failed Slate model of 1996:

SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was "posted" and when it will be "composted." As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our archive, "The Compost."

Obviously, that didn’t last long: artificial once-a-week publishing schedules were never going to work online. If a story is written and ready to go, neither its author nor its readers have any interest in sitting and twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the calendar to tick over to whatever day the publisher thinks that the article should appear. This kind of thing just seems funny nowadays:

U.S. News Weekly will have near-instantaneous turnaround: The magazine will close on Thursday night and be made available at noon on Friday.

Er, that’s not "near-instantaneous", it’s a timelag of a good 12 hours, which is a long time in today’s news cycle. But more to the point, many of the stories will have been written long before Thursday night, and the wait until noon on Friday is going to be excruciating for any writer who sees his story growing staler by the hour.

But wait, it gets worse. US News, in going subscription-only, is making a conscious decision to remove itself from the vibrant politics-and-policy debate online. That’s silly, but at least they know they’re doing it. But the decision to go PDF is just crazy: even Slate circa 1996 didn’t make that mistake, and realized that it was ridiculous to give up the freedom to add new content throughout the week, and to offer interactive features.

What’s more, there are two things you can do with a PDF: you can print it out and read it on paper, or you can read it on-screen. US News is going to have subscribers in both camps. But if you’re reading on paper, you want parallel columns and intelligible two-dimensional page layouts; if you’re reading on screen, you want easy scrolling and a much more one-dimensional beginning-to-end format. The two are almost impossible to reconcile.

The editor of US News, Brian Kelly, tells Jeff that "if you can get 200,000 people to pay for a product, you’re doing very well". When Slate abandoned its subscription experiment, it had a paid subscriber base in "the high twenty thousands". US News will be hard-pressed to achieve even that number, given the level of competition it faces from the likes of Politico and the print newsweeklies, including the Economist, all of which are free online.

I give this experiment six months to a year before it’s abandoned when the writers for the weekly realise they’re basically shouting into a void, and the publishers realise they’re not making any money off it. It might even last less time than that, if US News print subscribers don’t bother to download the PDF — which is being offered to them for free. This product not only isn’t worth $19.95 a year, it’s not even valuable enough to persuade anybody to subscribe to the print edition of the magazine, or to renew their subscription. It’s doomed, and the only question is when it’s going to die.