The New Yorker Web Site is Entirely Free This Summer (Until It Goes Behind a Paywall This Fall)

Yes­ter­day, The New York­er mag­a­zine pub­lished “A Note to Read­ers,” announc­ing the new strat­e­gy behind its web site. The site now has a dif­fer­ent look and feel. It will also be gov­erned by a new set of eco­nom­ics, which will include putting the entire site behind a pay­wall. The edi­tors write, “in the fall, we [will] move to a sec­ond phase, imple­ment­ing an eas­i­er-to-use, log­i­cal, metered pay­wall. Sub­scribers will con­tin­ue to have access to every­thing; non-sub­scribers will be able to read a lim­it­ed num­ber of pieces—and then it’s up to them to sub­scribe. You’ve like­ly seen this sys­tem elsewhere—at the Times, for instance—and we will do all we can to make it work seam­less­ly.”

But, until then, the site won’t be half open (as it has been dur­ing recent years). It’ll be entire­ly open. Again, the edi­tors write: “Begin­ning this week, absolute­ly every­thing new that we publish—the work in the print mag­a­zine and the work pub­lished online only—will be unlocked. All of it, for every­one. Call it a sum­mer-long free-for-all. Non-sub­scribers will get a chance to explore The New York­er ful­ly and freely, just as sub­scribers always have.”

What should you read while The New York­er is open? I’d focus on the old stuff, which will pre­sum­ably get locked up too. Here are a few quick sug­ges­tions: Tru­man Capote’s In Cold Blood seri­al­ized in the pages of the mag­a­zine in 1965; J.D. Salinger’s Jan­u­ary 1948 pub­li­ca­tion of his endur­ing short sto­ry “A Per­fect Day for a Banana Fish;” and, of course, Han­nah Arendt’s orig­i­nal arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil”?  If you have prob­lems read­ing the text (in the lat­ter two cas­es), be sure to click the pages to zoom in.

via Gal­l­ey­Cat