After eight and a half years working full-time for Ars Technica, it's time for me to write something totally unlike anything that previously appeared under my name: a sales pitch. I'm a journalist for good reason, as I'm too gruff and unfriendly to be in sales, so please temper your expectations.
As you probably gathered by now, we're doing a subscription drive this week. Every person who buys a subscription will help us get through a difficult financial time, as the pandemic and oncoming recession cause a predictable decline in advertising revenue throughout the media industry.
In addition to giving you some nice perks like ad-free articles and a YubiKey 2FA device, your subscription dollars help make sure that people like me get to keep writing for Ars. I've written more than 3,000 articles for Ars Technica, and I don't intend to stop any time soon.
You want broadband coverage? I have good news
Now, I can't promise to personally torture Lee Hutchinson in the name of journalism, even though I support and encourage all efforts to do so. But I do promise to write more of the articles that led the Daily Beast to call me "probably Comcast's least favorite journalist."
I've been a full-time journalist for nearly 20 years, and at Ars I have more freedom to write what I want to write than I had at any other news organization. That has led to deep-dives into Comcast's data-cap meter and the cable company's disputes with Netflix, coverage of Verizon throttling a fire department's "unlimited" data during a California wildfire, and many articles about bizarre fees—like AT&T passing along its property taxes to customers and Frontier charging for routers that don't exist.
Working for Ars has also let me write about the travesty of rural (and even urban) broadband availability and provide ongoing coverage of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's long-term mission to stop regulation of essential broadband services while US residents suffer from a lack of competition, data-cap overage charges, unexpected bill increases, and bad customer service in general.
I haven't been anything but a journalist since college, and I cannot imagine working in an industry where you have to lie or selectively omit facts to sell a product instead of reporting and telling the truth. This is a business, but it's a business that works because people trust us to tell them the truth. There are people I work for who figure out how things get paid for, and if everything goes well I get to keep writing articles without considering whether hard-nosed journalism might offend a company that spends money on advertising.
Working at Ars—yeah, it’s pretty awesome
The other great thing about writing for Ars is being surrounded by smart people. I've often consulted with fellow Ars writers to better understand deep, technical topics, and this has frequently helped me write more informative articles. But when I say I'm surrounded by smart people, I don't just mean other writers and editors: our readers are much smarter than the average person, and they are prolific commenters. I'm always quick to read comments on my articles in case a reader brings up an obvious point I missed, asks about a topic I should have addressed, or points out a mistake I need to correct. (I'm a diligent fact-checker of my own stories before publication, but no one is perfect.) I can't think of another news organization where I'd be able to work with and write for so many smart people, all without leaving my house.
There was supposed to be a sales pitch in here somewhere, but I think you get the picture. I expect Ars to be strong for decades into the future, but the business realities that I thankfully never have to deal with ultimately determine how many full-time writers we can keep on staff. We're grateful to people who read our articles, but buying a subscription has an even bigger positive impact on our long-term viability.
We've got two subscription options:
Ars Pro ($25 per year) subscribers at the Ars Pro level get the following benefits:
- No ads anywhere
- No tracking scripts (though Twitter and other embeds have their own scripts we cannot control)
- "Classic View"—a widescreen-optimized old-school Ars homepage layout
- Access to subscriber-only forums where the real Ars graybeards hang out
- Full-text RSS feeds of all our articles
- PDF downloads of all our articles
Ars Pro++, currently discounted to $40 with the coupon code springPlusPlus20. Pro++ subscribers get everything from the Pro tier, with two additional benefits:
- Your choice of a YubiKey 5 NFC ($45 value) or YubiKey 5C ($50 value), both of which add an extra layer of security to your computing experience
- An optional "clean reading view" that strips Ars articles down to their essentials for easy consumption
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