You can snag a free Washington Post subscription to the national digital edition for six months just by being a Prime member—the Post price is usually $9.99 a month.
“After the first six months of access," Amazon said today, the members "can continue to enjoy unlimited digital access with a discounted monthly subscription rate of only $3.99, a savings of 60% per month.”
Unfortunately the offer appears to be only for new subscribers to the Post. Still, it’s a good deal for those eligible, and it makes sense from both the Post end and the Amazon one as a cross-promotional tool. In fact, it’s so logical that the big question is, “What took Jeff and friends so long?”
Bezos personally bought the Post in 2013 for a mere $250 million in cash, and he is reportedly worth $50 billion, so in the grand scheme of things, Post-related matters are small change for him.
One big question I have is what changes he’ll make, long term, on the editorial page. The Post was once among the flagship publications of American liberalism. Is it eventually headed toward a Bezos-style libertarian way of looking at the world, assuming it isn’t there already?
Even now, at least in the slant of its editorials, today’s Post is far from the leftish sheet its enemies depict it as being.
A related question, of course, is how the editorial and news sections will cover Amazon, as it presence keeps growing in the U.S. economy. Could the big story on working conditions at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters have come from the Post rather than the New York Times? Hardly.
That said, the current Amazon-Post offering is a bargain, and if you don’t already subscribe, you might well consider it—given the breadth and volume of the Post’s coverage. It is not as well organized or content-rich as the New York Times, but Bezos has the resources to take it there.
Related: Detailed Capital New York report.
I got it free for six months and when that ran out I got another six months for a buck (which I’m still in). Not sure what it goes to when this six months ends.
Keep in mind that for most pay-walled newspapers, you can search for the article’s title with Google, click on that link, and bypass the paywall. Newspapers apparently have to allow that backdoor to get Google to index the entire article.
Also, behind almost all big city papers are some very wealthy people or corporations with interests to protect. The same is true of TV networks. There’s an old adage about the folly of picking a fight with someone “who buys ink by the barrel.”
That’s also why all the hysteria about the Supreme Court decision on corporate personhood and campaign regulation was silly. It wasn’t just that unions and advocacy groups are also incorporated, with the latter illogically limited by so-called campaign reform laws but not the former. It’s that major news outlets are themselves not just giant corporations but giant corporations owned by still larger giant corporations. The law limited what the Sierra Club could do but not what GE could do through their ownership of (I believe) CBS.
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When Amazon was being sued in Maine federal court for attempting to illegally bundle printing a book in CreateSpace with normal shipping times from Amazon, the Seattle Times flat out refused to cover the story despite prompting from me and others. The paper’s business editor told me that story wasn’t going to run, although I believe at one point a AP story on it did slip through.
My own hunch is that at that time the family that owns the Seattle Times was heavily invested in Amazon and didn’t want anything to threaten that investment. And since them, the Seattle Times has done a major expose on Amazon, although it was about how little the company contributed to local charities.
Interesting. I had a trial subscription through Amazon Prime and just received an email stating that it was due for renewal at the rate of $149/year! I cancelled.
@MrsMac: Ouch—my sympathy. Old Amazon prime members apparently are grandfathered in at $99 a year. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_left_v4_sib?ie=UTF8&nodeId=201482600. Whether the $149 a year makes sense will vary from customer to customer
I got my subscription for free for the first six months. Last May, I got an additional six months for $1. In November, the price will increase to $3.99 per month. Works for me. The Post is a far better paper than the tabloid NYT and a heckuva better buy.
Oops, I wasn’t clear. My Amazon Prime is still $99 per year, but they want $149 to renew the Washington Post subscription—which is $11.99 per month, not $9.99 per month. I was originally offered free and then $9.99 per month, but apparently that isn’t available any longer. I couldn’t justify $149 per month just to read the news. It was the Post subscription that I cancelled, not my Amazon Prime (which I love).