urbanMSP

I've been paying $11.96/month for quite a while. I know that I could evade their paywall, but I've considered it sort of civic duty to support the hometown newspaper and journalism in general. I used to read a lot more Star Tribune articles, though, and I've sort of soured on the paper lately. I guess from an altrustic perspective I'd rather support MPR and MinnPost (and Streets.mn) than the Taylor-owned self-dealing-stadium-promoters.

Lately, when reading strib articles on my phone, it continually kicks me over to the app store, and moves the browser back to the previous page. It's annoying to the point that I read a lot less strib articles on my phone. It doesn't do it with any other website.

I guess $12 bucks a month hasn't seemed like much, especially compared to digital NY Times subscription. I used to get paper copies of the Strib, NY TImes, WSJ, and Economist, so I was obviously paying a lot more. Also, I'd love to get digital access to Finance and Commerce, but damn that is expensive. You'd think it wouldn't cost the same for digital only as digital + 5 paper papers a week.

Maybe I'll have to cancel and get a promotional deal. I'm sure the strib subscription people aren't loving this thread.

As long as they keep playing games with (very) low introductory offers and regular pricing that I'm unwilling to pay, I'll continue to cancel and resubscribe every few months. I'd gladly pay $10/month or give them $100/year up front. I'd actually prefer the "set it and forget it" yearly model TBH, though I'd suspect most people would continue to opt for the monthly bill.

HELP ME HELP YOU, Star Tribune!

I've used the multiple browsers on multiple devices trick to get my Strib news junkie fix. Recently I got an email from the Strib that they noticed I was among the top 5% of their readers by traffic, offering ten weeks for $5, then reverting to their normal price.

I was close to subscribing a few months ago but navigating the website to try and subscribe was such an awful experience I vowed on principle not to. I've grown increasingly intolerant of poor UX/UI. More lately the Strib website is occasionally polluted with ads that redirect viewers on iPhones/iPads away from the website to the App Store. How is that supposed to work out well for keeping your readers at your website? I'm not going to pay to have that done to me.

I'm sure my mood will change on this someday soon and I'll make the leap and try to subscribe, and I'll hit the wall of pain and give up. It's a cycle.

The regular price of a digital-only subscription is $2.99/WEEK. PER WEEK.

As MNdible pointed out, this is under $13/month. Yeah, it's above the $9.99 threshold. I have that threshold too. But was it worth it going through all the tricks to save less than $36 spread out over a year? No. I realized the Strib was providing some pretty damn good value for what amounts to less than a drink at most coffee places. Economics seem to indicate we're going to lose at least one of our big papers (with the PiPress the more likely candidate); I don't want to lose both.

I'll repost what I said in another thread - if you want hard-hitting, thoughtful news, you can't be a free rider. You need to support at least one institution (obviously if you're paying for MPR and MinnPost, you're meeting that duty), and hopefully most of the ones used frequently. But too many people happily consume the news for free and then wonder why quality has declined.

Yeah I don't get the logic that you'd gladly pay $10/month but $13/month is bonkers.

Very attractive redesigned website just went live in the past hour or so. Looks like it is still rolling out because some links I tap on are missing... Slow roll...

[edit]Then it disappears, returning to previous design...

It does look slick. Unfortunately, their current design did too, until the ads slowly crept onto more and more space on the page.

I'm also a little worried by how the page has become less information dense. It seems like they've made everything bigger, which means more scrolling.

Oh well. Excited for it to go live.

I saw the word "redesign" and fully expected another iteration of the incredibly low-information tabletized picturebook format that has been slowly overtaking every other news site in recent years, but, honestly, it's actually pretty good. The scrolling headlines on the current Strib site are consistently irritating -- stories tend to vanish just as comprehension sets in -- and a more stable front page is appreciated. I'd prefer smaller headlines because, being literate, I'm not scared of a web page containing words, but it's 2015 and web designers have decided more than 20 sentences on a page is unacceptable, so what can you do?

^Actually, I was drawing comparisons to the new Strib and what the Atlantic has done. Especially in regards to all the scrolling necessary!

I hate scrolling feeds. Talking to you VOX Media.

Yeah, the Atlantic's new site is turrible.

The Star Tribune bought City Pages and will stop publishing Vita.mn.

http://www.startribune.com/business/302763201.html

It's a weird move they made. But I suppose if you can't beat 'em, buy 'em.

City pages is half to a third of what it was 10 years ago. They lost good editorial staff and advertisers In droves with the last sale.

I'd say it's even worse than that. I haven't read CP in years. Every time I get suckered into glacing at an article online, it's awful.

Like every publication, City Pages has some really good journalism and some real bad stuff.

In other Strib news, their redesigned website went public today.

^ It almost immediately froze my browser.

It's definitely a little laggy. I had some hiccups. Nothing quite to the point of freezing my browser, but stuff acting clunky.

I've been seeing some article pages constantly reload (in Firefox), but have mostly managed to work around it.