With an enormous website full of free content every day, it seems that asking readers to pay 99 cents per issue for a tablet magazine from Huffington Post always did seem like an incongruity, which is why AOL is offering the publication for free. Huffington magazine's "premium" content is a lot different from that on the main site, with long-form stories more deeply reported than the 1,000 or so free articles it posts a day, but it's just hard to get used to paying for this brand, which is something HuffPo recognizes: "In the end, we felt that asking people to pay for the magazine was inconsistent with The Huffington Post itself, which has never charged for content," spokesman Rhoades Alderson told Capital New York's Joe Pompeo. The magazine's executive editor, Tim O'Brien, had told reporters at Huffington's launch: "We feel it's a premium product and it deserves to carry a price with it in order to access all the value we're giving people." But the magazine was first conceived as a free product, Forbes' Jeff Bercovici reported, and after five paid issues, that's how it's going to be.

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Adam Martin