A personal recommendation

Yesterday, I was reading a blog entry by Clay Shirky about the way newspapers are changing (and will have to change in the future) in order to survive and to give their customers what they want.  It discusses the issue of whether people are prepared to pay for reading a newspaper online at all, given the fact that

'if you rank readers by pages viewed in a month, the largest group by far, between a third and half of them, will visit only a single page' 

 Newspapers are faced with the challenge of how to generate income.  With paper editions, this was fairly straightforward:  their income came from the sale of newspapers and from the advertisers who placed ads in the papers.

Source:  cps.k12.in.us

But online readers object to having ads on the webpage.  For one thing, it slows down the loading of a page.

Source:  blog.nielson.com

This made me think about the sites and newsletters I am subscribed to (several - including English Profile Word of the Week, as I told you in a previous entry).

As well as free subscriptions, I also pay to subscribe to a small number of websites and their contents.

One of these is its-teachers.com.  I remember years back that the school where I worked had a subscription to the paper version of this magazine.

Right from the start (1990), the magazine was extremely popular with all the teachers in the school.  We looked forward to its arrival because it always came packed with very practical, immediately usable activities.  I for one found (and still find) that the suggestions also inspired me to produce my own activities for use in the classroom.

If you want a taste of what 'its' has to offer, why not sign up for the free monthly email newsletter.?  This will give you a taste of how a subscription might be useful to you.

And please share any subscriptions you have with the rest of us.  Sharing tips is the key feature of this blog.