How much the AJC is worth (to me)

 (not even worth stealing)

We have five WNBA games on tap today - the first is going on as I type, Washington is leading the Liberty 41-40 with 1:30 to go in the first half.  If New York loses this one, I expect a certain person on Twitter to go batshit insane.

My plan is to hit the game that is the easiest one to see - Seattle @ Phoenix at 10 pm on ESPN2.  I'll have to go to bed a little bit later than usual, but hey, them's the breaks.  There's nothing that beats watching the W on television; the picture and sound quality are just better and more dependable than Live Access.

This year, I paid $14.99 for Live Access.  Let's assume that I watched every Dream away game on Live Access, and just those games alone.  That's a fee of 88 cents a game.  Is it worth it? You bet your sweet bippy it's worth it.  I love my Dream at least 88 cents a game worth.

But you can watch a lot more than just 88 cents per game.  You can watch any WNBA game you want, including all of the archived games that have already been played this season.  You can stop them, start them, speed it up.  People whine about the product, but jeez, open your wallet up.  You're never going to get a better deal than that.  Even if the product was crappy and the $15 was just a pro-forma donation to the WNBA, I'd still be paying it.  The WNBA is at least $15 worth of my present day happiness.

Now, consider the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  I've had the chance to meet a lot of nice people working the Atlanta Dream beat at the AJC.  Unfortunately, it appears to be the niche beat and one of the lowest ranking reporters on the totem pole usually gets sent to cover the team, so it's a different person every year.  Not much continuity there.

Reporting on the Dream at the main city paper tends to be spotty.  At least I think it is.  I wouldn't know.  I stopped reading the AJC two years ago, as a protest against the lack of Dream coverage.  I think my disaffection with the AJC really started with their "Ha-Ha" reporting attitude of some of their sports bloggers after the infamous Elmo Game. It wasn't the kind of sports reporting that I needed to pay for, and frankly, I haven't missed it.

The AJC is trying the paywall solution to its financial woes.  They have a website called ajc.com which reports the main stories with a special expanded section (probably the stuff you get in the dead tree version) called myajc.com.  The cost of having myajc.com is $3.46/week.

This is approximately 50 cents per day.  Way too high.  I didn't even read 75 cents worth of the print version of the AJC per day.  (It is now $1 per day for the daily print version; I don't know how much the Sunday version is.)

So how much would I pay for the right to get all of the stories I wanted to read online?  Since most of a local paper is crap, I'd pay 5 cents per day.  I think that's a fair price.  I'd read the few articles I wanted to read, and to hell with the rest.

I'd pay 5 cents per day.  The AJC wants to charge 50 cents per day.  It looks like the AJC and I have a difference on price point.