Remember summer, dear reader? Remember the balmy days of late July and a certain someone’s unfortunate cargo shorts and your own statement-making shades, the shattering sunlight and the trickle of Popsicle juice making its way down your wrist? Late July is also when we launched the redesigned newyorker.com and wrote our last letter to you, announcing that for the rest of the summer and into the fall we would unlock everything we published—everything in the weekly magazine and the fifteen-some pieces that appear exclusively online every day—so that everyone, including non-subscribers, could get a full sense of The New Yorker. (Subscribers, of course, have always had carte blanche.)
An extended free-for-all is what it was, and dozens of Web sites went on a curatorial link-bait binge, assembling top-ten (and top-fourteen and top-eight) lists of New Yorker reported pieces, humor pieces, short stories, essays, and cartoons.
Naturally, we were hoping that the exhibitionism of July-till-now would be an enticement. We said then that we would soon come to a “second phase,” and here it is: as of now, we are beginning an easy-to-use metered paywall. You probably know how this works; the New York Times has a metered paywall, and so do many other publications. The idea is to deliver The New Yorker to you seamlessly on every platform and for us to charge a fair price. (And it really is fair. One week’s access to The New Yorker costs a subscriber less than a good cup of coffee.)
The truth is that, ever since The New Yorker went online, we’ve always had a paywall. (Remember those bewildering little blue locks?) Now all pieces—Web and print—will live in front of it, and you can start wherever you wish. If you already subscribe, all you have to do is sign in and it’s clear sailing. If you don’t, you get to read six stories each calendar month, whether from the current issue, from an issue published five years ago, or from a blog updated ten minutes ago. If you want to make the “wall” go away and read a seventh, you’ll have to subscribe.
Again, if you already subscribe, you can read everything. If you have a log-in, click “Sign in”; if not, click “Link your subscription,” follow the simple steps, and you’re home. We know that subscribers come from many places. Maybe you subscribed on a Kindle or an iPhone, or with an e-mail address that is out of date. If there’s a problem, we have a team of customer-service people who will help you. If you’re a subscriber, we want you to have access to everything, and we will do all that we can to help you get there.
For customer service, contact 800-444-7570 or . If you’re outside the United States, call 515-243-3273.
For more about the paywall, visit our frequently asked questions.
