Some twenty-two magazines were to go on the Web. Isaacson said around ten editors would participate full or part time. Total investment in the Web site was to reach the “mid six figures,” and “with advertising it should be in the black within a year.” “There may be a mix of ads and subscription fees,” Isaacson said. Mercifully, the advertising would not be the intrusive Prodigy kind that popped up on the bottom of my screen in a garish, Vegas style. Jim Kinsella, the ex-newspaper editor who presided over the Web area, said he was pushing for a subscription fee of around $8 a month. I would have wanted the price to be a few dollars lower, but it was fine if I got enough for my money. If nothing else, Kinsella wanted readers to be able to stay online without the time charges that made thousands unplug their hookups with America Online and similar services. A product manager with Microsoft would later say as much to the _New York Times_ in discussing Bill Gates’ new service: “We’re trying to reduce the threshold of pain. We think users hate connect fees.”[4.18] Kinsella’s $8 monthly fee—his proposed figure, not Time Warner’s—would be for Pathfinder itself, not for the Internet connection. I did some quick math. Pathfinder could indeed be a competitive possibility if Time Warner were able to lower the cost of using the Internet by way of cable television from the $75-$100 a month that people typically paid for such arrangements. Mass use might enable Time Warner to undercut the $20 that the _N & O_ presently charged. Typical readers might want to keep reading a _local_ newspaper, and the _N & O_ could drop its own prices, but this was still a good example of how national media just might drain at least some readers away from the local media. Understandably, Kinsella was thinking in mass, national terms, as I would have done. He predicted that within five or ten years half the country might be able to reach the Net in one way or another. Others at Time were similarly optimistic. Not everyone in late 1994 was so sanguine. Mark Stahlman, for example, a media expert in New York, shrugged off Net publications as “just the latest in a series of fads.” Richard M. Smith, _Newsweek_’s editor in chief who was running the new-media committee of the Magazine Publishers of America, was skeptical about online services in general: “The people who are making money are the people who are running conferences about it.”[4.19]