Nieman Foundation at Harvard
The venerable liberal political weekly — cofounded by Walter Lippmann, for whom our office building is named — has Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes as its new owner, and he’s decided to open the gates:
We are pleased to announce that, as of today, all articles on the TNR website are now accessible free of charge to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. This decision is in line with our desire to enable new readers to discover and share the best of what TNR’s writers produce each day. While readers will continue to need to subscribe in order to read our content in print or on tablet devices, access to recent TNR content on the web will be free.
A paywall for new articles always seemed like a strange strategy for a magazine whose purpose is to influence political debates, not to make money. TNR’s lost about half of its paid print circulation since 2000.
