Let’s say you’re reading The Brothers Karamazov and wondering if Ivan will silently decide to let his illegitimate half-brother knock off their horrible old man. It’s gripping stuff, Dostoevsky is ratcheting up the tension, and the last thing you’d want is to turn the page and encounter an ad for a big sale on samovars. You don’t want a samovar, you don’t need a samovar and, what’s worse, the tale that Dostoyevsky has so brilliantly spun has abruptly ground to a halt.
I’m not claiming, let’s be very clear, that reading an article in The American Prospect chills your very marrow the way that Karamazov does. We merely, if you’ll permit me to say so, turn out many of the most insightful articles you’ll find on the political economy that shapes our daily lives. The articles on what happens to the Main Streets of rural America when ICE comes to town. On the workers at a hospital that closes its doors when it can’t make the debt payments that private equity has inflicted on it. On the Republican and corporate forays against democracy that way antedate Trump. On the eternal fight to turn the Democrats into an adequate counterweight to financial capitalism and our tinpot despot.
Earlier this month, we ceased running those programmatic ads — over whose content we had little control — that popped up in the middle of our articles. They brought in a chunk of change, and as is the case at most publications, chunks of change are always needed. But they had nothing to do with the subject of our pieces, and they were sometimes promoting candidates or causes that actually appalled us. Ultimately, we decided that the cost to the reading experience – to your reading experience – outweighed the value of that chunk of change.
We may not reach Dostoyevskian heights (I was going to add “or plumb Dostoyevskian depths,” but then I realized that writing about Trump means plumbing Dostoyevskian depths at least six times a day), but at least you no longer have to wade through 21st-century samovar ads in the midst of our stories.
The Prospect has never erected a paywall between our articles and whoever wants to read them; we have a clear editorial mission that a paywall would constrict. We want as many people as possible to understand the constraints on democracy, liberty and equality that our political economy inflicts on us, and we want as many people as possible to consider the plausible alternatives to that economy that you’ll find when you read us.
So as with a paywall, now so with those ads. Once you’ve opted to give some of your time to our work, you deserve to access it without annoying distractions. (Now and then, our work itself may annoy you, but it won’t be a distraction.)
So how does a magazine like the Prospect survive without a paywall or programmatic ads? Through readers like you. If you want to keep reading the three or four or five new articles we post daily, or our bimonthly print magazine, if you want to keep us covering those battles for democracy and just plain decency that are being fought every day, and our advocating for ways to make our political economy more functional and more just, then help us do just that. A generous donor has offered to match all of your donations for the rest of the campaign.
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