The ability to subscribe electronically to your newspaper of choice isn’t anything new (at least in the US), however it’s still a fair question to ask, "What exactly am I paying for?"
For national news, there is no reason to pay for an e-edition of a newspaper when you have places like Google/Yahoo!/Bing and other newspapers to choose from for free. Local news is the only reason anyone really wants to read a newspaper to begin with. However even with local news there’s really not much in the paper than you couldn’t get from other places.
I dug deeper to find out if there was really anything via an e-edition newspaper subscription that would actually make it worth paying for, and this is what I discovered:
The two example papers I will use are the St. Petersburg Times in Florida and the Hartford Courant in Connecticut.
SP Times e-edition info: Info
Hartford Courant e-edition: Info
These two papers more or less exemplify what all other e-editions for other papers offer.
First you’re told you get the complete paper since the online edition isn’t complete. Good, but not good enough.
Next you’re told the entire paper is searchable. Also good but not really something worth bragging about, much less paying for.
Text-to-speech option. A-ha, now this is worth paying for; it’s something the printed paper cannot do nor can the regular web site do easily (there would be a lot of manual involvement with highlighting text for your computer to ‘read’ and ‘speak’ back).
SP Times calls their TTS option "Read Aloud" where you can listen direct or download MP3s of article content. Very good.
Hartford Courant’s TTS option is simply called text-to-speech.
How does the TTS sound?
On SP Times, there is a demo and said honestly it’s pretty good. Yes, it’s still somewhat ‘computery’-sounding, but not in an in-your-face way. The voice heard is very easy to understand, but it’s the inflection that makes it comptutery. You’ll know what I mean by that if you listen to it.
SP Times’ TTS is made very obvious, and that’s good:
The Courant’s demo requires you to double-click an article to get the ‘Listen’ button. On listen the voice quality is amazingly good – BUT (and this is a big but) – Firefox prompted to download a plugin while IE did not, so the site is purposely IE-friendly first. Not cool. Otherwise it’s as good as TTS gets.
This is how to get to the ‘Listen’ portion in a Courant article:
Not the most intuitive interface, but as said above, the voice quality is really good.
Your paper o’ choice will have some means of TTS most likely that you can demo with the e-edition.
Am I saying it’s all about the TTS for e-editions of newspapers?
Pretty much. The full-search capability including past archives is nice, but it’s the TTS that really makes the sell here. It’s something you can listen to at work, download to a smartphone for playback, etc. The TTS is a genuinely good paid feature.
But is it enough to justify forking over 5 bucks a month for? That’s your call.
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