VEER Magazine Cruise

This evening the boyfriend and I joined other writers, advertisers and supporters of VEER Magazine on a cruise on a sunset cruise on the three masted schooner the American Rover (see photo above via the b/f's phone - I look like hell).  I have been writing a monthly LGBT/political column in VEER for over 2 and a half years that seeks to educate local readers about LGBT issues and the real political positions of those running for elected office.  My September, 2013, makes the case for why voters need to get out and vote for Terry McAuliffe for Governor on election day.  The October column will look at the Lt. Governor and Attorney General races and why voters need to be sure to get out and vote for Ralph Northam and Mark Herring.

One of the fun aspects of this evening was meeting a wonderful British couple - the husband is a British naval officer attached to NATO - and their recently college graduate daughter who is doing a volunteer internship with VEER before working on the 2014 Olympic Games in Russia. I suspect we will have them over as dinner guests to our home sometime soon.  The last of the sunset is below.

New York Times to end paid Internet service

I am glad that the New York Times has finally come to its senses (http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSWEN101120070918?feedType=RSS&feedName=internetNews&rpc=22&sp=true). While I enjoy many of the Times columnists, I refused to pay for opinions when I could get so many other views for free (and often get the Times columns a few days later in other publications. The blogosphere is changing how people get both the news and commentary. Here's some of the Reuters story:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times Co said on Monday it will end its paid TimesSelect Web service and make most of its Web site available for free in the hopes of attracting more readers and higher advertising revenue. TimesSelect will shut down on Wednesday, two years after the Times launched it, which charges subscribers $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year to read articles by columnists such as Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman.

The trademark orange "T's" marking premium articles will begin disappearing Tuesday night, said the Web site's Vice President and General Manager Vivian Schiller. The move is an acknowledgment by The Times that making Web site visitors pay for content would not bring in as much money as making it available for free and supporting it with advertising.

Figuring out how to increase online revenue is crucial to the Times and other U.S. newspaper publishers, which are struggling with a drop in advertising sales and paying subscribers as more readers move online. "Of course, everything on the Web is free, so it's understandable why they would want to do that," said Alan Mutter a former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and proprietor of a blog about the Internet and the news business called Reflections of a Newsosaur.
"The more page views you have, the more you can sell," he said. "In the immediate moment it's a perfectly good idea."