1996 All Over Again

Felix Salmon does an ante-mortem on US News's new PDF subscription service:

I give this experiment six months to a year before it's abandoned when the writers for the weekly realise they're basically shouting into a void, and the publishers realise they're not making any money off it. It might even last less time than that, if US News print subscribers don't bother to download the PDF -- which is being offered to them for free. This product not only isn't worth $19.95 a year, it's not even valuable enough to persuade anybody to subscribe to the print edition of the magazine, or to renew their subscription. It's doomed, and the only question is when it's going to die.