What sort of online experience is going to provide you with that exposure to that particular market, just in your city or your neighborhood, to GLBT people? Even if I were to glance at 2 or 3 pages of 365gay.com a week, and a couple of visits to gay blogs per day, they would not provide the same exposure for the hundreds of advertisers who are contained in one single print copy of a big-city GLBT paper. (I’m thinking of when I read the Washington Blade in the 80s-90s or San Diego’s Gay and Lesbian Times in the 90s-00s.)

Losing the local GLBT media is a loss for your local businesses, and your neighborhood, too.

Perhaps if gay magazines like Genre and Out focused more on relevant news stories, rather than on the perfectly chiseled eye-candy of the fetish-ized boy-toys, they would get more loyal readers who’d be willing to pay a subscription bill. Not to mention the ridiculous fashion layouts that focus solely on EXTREMELY expensive labels like Versace, Cavalli, Dolce & Gabanna etc. and $40 underwear???! Give us a break!

Most magazines aimed at gay men have become catalogs, just like magazines for straight women, which do nothing but try and convince us that we need expensive clothes, the perfect body, butt implants, a year round tan and flawless skin in order to be worthy.

Heaven forbid that we focus on anything other than muscles, sex and expensive clothes. Oh, and expensive property.

I guess I’m afraid of controlling the web. Sometimes good intentions grow into monsters.

As a news junky but a non-subscriber to papers and most magazines I would allow myself to be nibbled to death by nickel-a-story bites only if without $ incentive there will be less dependable news. Or if I had no access otherwise.

I’m a long-time public radio “subscriber” and don’t like how ads have slipped in to pay the bills. But it’s partially because there are many non-paying listeners. If our public radio station played only to paid subscribers would they have less audience and less educational effect? You say who cares if you lose some readers.

Another take–with all these camera phones and bloggers the world is often watching when it wasn’t with a professional media machine that could or politically would not be everyplace. Would unionizing prevent our little eyes from showing what we see and think? Would inflation or demand because of popularity raise the cost per article? There’s something to be said for the dedication and motive of the unpaid. Fresh ideas often come from the non-pros. I know they aren’t just cranking for the $ or because they are playing to what I want to hear. There’s also something to be said for a professional, educated, dependable, organization able to send reporters to glean news from wherever. I just don’t want to end of with a few bags of wind like AM radio or a “star” system where the voices all start sounding alike.

My home page is a collection of favored news sites of online magazines and newspapers. I don’t want to lose any of them so I understand the concept of the need for a pay as you consume system. I’d like to see some discussion about articles, news, byline availability based on site subscription. One of my online sources still publishes paper (about $60/year) and the last I looked had an article-limited/free edition online. It’s an expensive weekly I pick up at the library. I would subscribe to the full edition online if the cost was much less and I think many others would too. So in this case some kind of pay as I read deal might be just right for me. There must be some example of websites that already use this pay per hit consumption to tell us how it’s working.

There are environmental reasons not to subscribe to magazines and newspapers-paper and pollution.

Poverty of the often invisible underclass limits book consumption besides the surfeit of other entertainments out there.

We’re in the midst of a possibly fabulous consciousness change that also may be a change in how things are consumed and paid for. It feels like a dangerous time when poor decisions, perhaps well intended, might undermine that growth.

This is a monumental moment!

No religion bashing? No dreary gloomy bs?

What have you done with Wayne Besen?

I think someone must have gotten laid last night.