I see it’s been a couple of months since I posted. I let my free 30 day trial lapse at the end of April as a double experiment:
To see if my sister, with whom I was sharing the subscription, noticed that it lapsed and asked me about it. She didn’t, which means she wasn’t really using it.
To see if I missed it. There are very occasionally articles I might have wanted to read but cannot because they are behind the paywall. But most of the articles I’ve wanted to read, even though technically part of the subscription, are available anyway after a subscription warning.
I’m not saying I won’t sign up as a paid subscriber. But since the end of April I haven’t felt compelled to yet. We’ll see.
I think your 2nd point misses a valuable part of having a subscription, which is simply scrolling or clicking through the many different topics or subjects that you’re interested in to discover things you wouldn’t otherwise have come across, not to mention exploring specific newspapers and magazines beyond what a headline or two may show you.
You’re probably right. I’ll think about adding it back again. I admit it was nice being able to jump into National Geographic or Wall Street Journal or Scientific American articles freely.
My sister, in the meanwhile, claims she actually had been trying it every day but “didn’t want to bother me about it.”
You can read articles from some paid publications by RSS (remember that?). I can read several feature articles per day of The Atlantic that way. The app that I use, Newsify, only shows a couple of days of articles, but if you mark one to be saved, it is available indefinitely.
I also find News+ useful to read articles that are behind a paywall on the native site, but will open in News+ by simply using the Open in News command from the Share menu in Safari. For example virtually all the articles in Verge.
I don’t use a local app, because I don’t want to have to leave it running 24x7 in the background. Many sites only keep the most recent 20-30 articles in the feed, so a busy site may have articles run through the feed and expire out in an hour or two, before I can read them if the app isn’t always running.
Instead, I use an Internet-based reader, Feedly. It continuously pulls feeds in the background, and it maintains an extensive history (thanks to the combined feeds of all their users) going back as far as you will ever be interested in reading.
Their free tier lets you follow up to 100 feeds. Or they have paid subscription tiers with additional capabilities.
Thanks.