An invitation from Dan Rather [View all]
Earl G. has authorized me to share this information with DU.
As some of you may know, Dan Rather has a new website called "Steady" that he launched a few months ago. It is a paysite although he has welcomed those without funds to participate. I think he has come to realize many can't even afford monthly dues easily especially during Covid-19.
He said many major newspapers, journals and print magazines have come up with a solution to this problem. As we know most major dailies and other print publications have firewalls that ask us to pay for multiple subscriptions that are often beyond our budgets. Alternatively, they let us read 1-5 free articles or allow us to read by giving up personal information, allowing ads and spam. Many have decided to go to other lesser known publications for information. This means people are not fully informed about issues of importance or are even led to depend on questionable news sources.
Our easy access to articles has been firewalled and has impacted how we can find links to good articles, significant newspapers, journals, etc. As you know these are often posted here still, but many of us can't see the links after the free articles a month are used. Many could benefit from this potential alternative. It sounds legitimate as I trust Rather to be honest; He suggests we give such a site a try on his site. It seems fairly inexpensive as in pennies per article which I am willing to pay; whereas a month's subscription to read one or more major news article seems too extreme.
It's called PayGo and I wanted to share this with any DUer who wants more access to NY Times, New Yorker, WA PO
Paygo is a Micropayments service that enables you to read Paywalled content, for several cents, without having to subscribe, signup, share your personal information or view nasty ads.
You deposit a small balance, say $3, with Paygo and every time you encounter a Paygo enabled Paywall, you can choose to read that one article for a small price set by the Creator or Publisher. Paygo then pays the creator so you do not have to share your information with them (unless you wish to) and facilitates making very small payments, several cents.
No ads, No subscriptions.
Anyway, worth checking out.
https://paygo.media/
Dan Rather's email:
Dear Free Subscribers to Steady,
We thank you for your interest and support for our endeavor. One of my hopes in starting Steady was to pioneer new approaches to make journalism sustainable, for my own team and others. As part of this experimentation, we are collaborating with a new startup that seeks to create a pay-as-you-go model. This could fulfill a demand from people who may not want to subscribe to multiple publishers or those who may not be able to afford a full subscription. (Of course if you want to switch to a paid subscription to Steady you can do so here).
Paygo aims to give readers more agency over the content that they want to read by offering flexible options to unlock paywalls. To test this out, we are going to offer some of our paid Steady content for you to view. Paygo is even giving you a credit to get going and test out this new model. So please check it out at the link below and let us know what you think. The goal is to be able to create a new option for paywalls that still supports quality journalism.
If you have any questions, you can read more about how Paygo works here or email the Paygo Support team at help@paygo.media.
Thank you for your help.
Best wishes,
Dan
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