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Tote Bag, Anyone? Slate Considers Membership Model as Way to Get Readers' Cash

This article is more than 10 years old.

Would you pay for face time with Farhad? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Add Slate to the list of news organizations with a sudden interest in getting online readers to contribute some cash rather than leaving the whole thing to advertisers.

The online magazine has been conducting a survey to gauge support for a subscription-based premium membership program. Membership would include such perks as "access to Slate personalities" --  is this my chance to finally score some quality time with Farhad Manjoo? -- discounts to events, extra content and membership in a book club.

"It’s a very early stage exploration of ideas we’ve batted around for a long time," says Slate Group chairman and editor in chief Jacob Weisberg, via email.

Here's a page from the survey, courtesy of my colleague Kashmir Hill, who caught it.

Slate's explorations come just as its corporate cousin, the Washington Post, is reportedly considering a digital pay model of its own after years of dismissing the idea as unworkable. Warren Buffett, the Post Co.'s biggest outside shareholder after the controlling Graham family, has made his own preference for paywalls clear.

The Post seems likely to emulate the metered model adopted last year by The New York Times, which permits users a limited number of free page views per month before requiring a subscription. The Times also weighed the merits of a membership program, asking readers about it in a survey similar to Slate's, but settled on the metered approach as more robust.

"We’re NOT looking at any kind of metered model or paywall (we tried that in 1998!) and there’s no connection to the kind of model that the Post has reportedly been looking at -- other than the shared appreciation that journalism is healthier if it has multiple sources of revenue," Weisberg says. [Note: Weisberg replied to me just after I published this post; I've updated it to include his comments.]

In 2011, Slate's sometime rival, Salon, instituted its own premium membership program very similar to the one Slate seems to be eyeing. But it discontinued the program, Salon Core, after only nine months, saying it had been "a challenge to move the needle significantly."

[Update: The original headline to this story said only that Slate was considering a digital pay model. After Weisberg objected to that phrasing rather, um, vociferously, I agreed to reconsider it. A premium membership of the type Slate is exploring, including bonus content available to members, is absolutely a pay model. There's no question of that. But some readers who glanced only at the headline were mistakenly concluding that Slate was on the verge of adopting a paywall, so in the interest of clarity I changed the wording.]

Here's the page of Slate's survey asking about the book club.