A subscription to the New York Times costs $769.60 per year. A good chunk of that is printing and delivery costs for something I don't want anyway: a giant stack of physical paper. On top of the odd environmental disconnect of shipping a whole tree's worth of paper to each individual customer in tiny chunks every day over a year, there's the disconnect of customers paying to have advertising delivered to them.

How they expect people to pay for that in a world where I can read their best articles online for free is totally beyond me.

What I would like to see is:

- An iPad version of the full paper (not just the selections they have now).

- No advertising.

- A price reflective of the reduced printing and delivery costs. I don't want to subsidize the physical paper subscriptions of other people.

- Fast search and access to the archives from within the iPad app.

Then again, as long as the web site remains free (although hobbled by advertising and splitting articles across pages), I doubt the iPad app would get much traction. You never know though.

Also, with all that said, I don't live in New York. For my local paper (the San Francisco Chronicle) to warrant me subscribing, they'd need to start doing some real journalism. For example, they could look at the city and state government. In a budget crisis, you'd think there would be plenty of material to use. The milquetoast reporting they currently practice isn't worth any of my money.