I’ve always really liked Salon Magazine (for free) is it worth
$ 30.00 for the complete content? Is this a deal or not? Any opinions from the SDMB literati?
Their thing where you can view a long ad and get free access for the day is the way to go. Especially since you can read all the back stories as well.
Feh, not for me. There are plenty of other news and op/ed sites I go to for free, and I don’t find *Salon * that good that I can afford to part with 30 smackers. I don’t blame them for charging; it’sjust that I am such a cheap btch.
[And I goddam HATE the “ins” and “del” keys on my new computer!!]
I was a faithful daily reader of Salon prior to their shift to a pay site and coughed up the thirty bucks for the first year. Since then the quality of the articles has plunged significantly and I didn’t renew when my scrip was up. I still look at the site daily but don’t find much worthwhile.
The current articles have much less original reporting and tend more towards lightweight political/opinion pieces and media reviews.
Maybe it has changed, but I always looked at Salon as a mouthpiece and not a “news site”. And I first visited Salon about a year and half ago.
I always used to read SALON the same way that I read THE NEW YORKER. For the cartoons.
$ 30.00 / year?
Don’t make me larf. I’ll pretend to read the ad, thank you.
You can click through that four-page ad in less than 3 seconds if you’re good 
I love Salon. I’ve been a subscriber for two years now. I haven’t really noticed a drop-off in the quality either. If it wasn’t 5 in the morning I’d find a few links to articles that kept me coming back. I’ll post 'em a bit later on.
Even after they went to pay, and it was obvious that they were trying to sell Salon by restricting access to sex-related stories. I eventually coughted up the money, because they often intrigued me with their subscriber content, even the stuff that didn’t have directly to do with ‘booty.’ With it I got the license to download MP3s of Dylan Thomas, which beats the shit out of the Dylan Thomas recordings I gleaned from what few Caedmon recordings I was able to glean from the collection of Vinyl recordings at my undergraduate school
I also got a subsription to The Utne Reader, only now it’s called just Utne and it seems much more like a Pinko Lifestyle and Self-Affirmation Magazine than, as previously advertised, the best of the alternative press.
I tried the subscription for a month or two, and decided against continuing.
Salon: You can be a pay site, or you can have annoying gobs of pop-up ads, but NOT BOTH.
I’m quite happy with Salon in my second year of subscription.
I read it every day (it’s my home page) and am constantly amazed at the wide range of articles and content.
I will continue to subscribe to do what little I can to keep it alive.
Yes, it’s worth it to me. YMMV