Slashdot Mirror
New York Times Exploring how to Charge for Content
Mr. Christmas Lights writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times is
mulling subscription for Internet Archives. It doesn't appear that the free (but subscription required - BugMeNot to the rescue!) ability to read NYT articles less than a week old would change. However, instead of paying $2.95 per article for stuff that is more than a week old, one idea being floated is an annual fee of $49.99 for unlimited access to anything in the last year." (More below.)
Mr. Christmas Lights continues "The WSJ has been pretty successful with their online subscriptions - over 700,000 people currently pay $79 ($39 if you get the print edition) a year for full online access of the last 30 days of articles - the story above happens to be in their public area. But they are a notable exception, with media organizations struggling to charge for News now that it is widely available for free on the Internet. For example, Slashdot recently discussed the AP's plan to charge members to post content online. Will the "GoogleZon" end up replacing the 4th Estate as depicted in the entertaining and informative 8 minute EPIC video?"
They covered this themselves two months ago.
Or we could just explore other sources of news than the New York Times. I can sympathise with their need for revenue, but they are certainly not worth $50 a year for me to access, and certainly not worth $2.95 per article.
...would pay for it; it's the best news service coming out of America right now.
English guy.
They should only charge for articles that are true, or where the reporter actually did the work, instead of sitting at home in his flat in Brooklyn smoking dope.
In the Netherlands there are already paid subscribtions for online content of newspapers. For instance the Volkskrant offers a subscription for receiving the paper newspaper only on saturday and on weekdays you can watch the articles online.
Their best bet would be to offer both. A $2.95/article and $49.99/yr for those who wanted one or the other. If your doing research and need 1 old article, then your best bet is to pay $2.95 for it. But if your researching, say, how common it was for Bush to be mentioned on the front page since he took office, your going to be reading A LOT of articles, and paying 50 bucks is a much better deal.
Free MacMini
Now that you have Highspeed it's not good enough. Yyou have to spend hundreds of dollars a month to sneeze it seems. So when is slashdot going to start charging a fee?
Speaking of bugmenot, am I the only one whom the bugmenot firefox plugin doesn't work for?
Why should I pay? How about I just goto the library and pull out the article I am looking for in their microfilm/microfiche archive? Even small Universities have those going all the way back to the 1890's, as do most libraries.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I live in the DC area, so the Washington Post is my big local paper. I subscribe to the Sunday edition (its like $10 for 10 weeks). All I really want is the "bag o' stuff" that comes with it, full of ads, comics, Parade, etc. The rest of the paper I prefer to read online. I wish they'd give me an option of paying for the bag of stuff. I don't mind supporting them, but I don't want to create the waste of me having a physical paper I don't want to read.
So Washington Post people, if you read this, and you do because you've quoted people from Slashdot in articles, sell me the bag o' stuff by itself and you can keep the money you would've spent on printing my Sunday paper.
but does the world work like that any longer? I mean, domain experts and reporters all in one place? under one roof, under one set of political control, beliefs, and political slant? Spewing News at you through their brand of trumpet?
Or, is News ala Carte from here on out and they just have not fell over yet? (despite the WWJ success; people look for familiar, for the short term.)
All these subscriptions at the same time as online advertising is on the rise...or at least so the Economist says it is. Advertising revenues by Google and Yahoo are predicted to rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of America's three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC. And the NY Times uses google ads, so if google ads are making cash, then the NY Times is also probably making cash from those google ads...I guess just not enough. Nothing's ever enough though.
...for them to get it right.
First of all, the $2.95 per article is nuts. That plan should be DOA.
Now think of how much it costs them to print millions of pages of dead-tree copies of their newspaper. There is enormous potential for the NYT to cut costs by switching (not entirely, of course) to a web/subscription content delivery model. Not to mention the positive effect such a move would have on the environment.
For a 'progressive' press mogul like the NYT, a leaner, greener newspaper makes sense.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
The best way to do this is via a google (or microsoft) micropayment system. Sort of like millicent .. except it's not as intrusive and is integrated with google desktop and internet explorer. Instead of having to fill out a form and address everytime .. a user can have a monthly limit of $25 (this limit can be by the broker themselves since they dont want to be over liable .. they can also restrict that companies or individuals cant get paid more than a certain amount from any one individual .. other anti fraud schemes will also be needed) .. anyway .. the point is that with a IE or google desktop integrated micropayment system .. it should be possible for individuals to sell music, tv shows, movies and other stuff. There needs to be an Open DRM standard though .. or musicians won't play along. Maybe the standard can be haxx0red or whatever .. thats inevitable .. but the casual/easy copying has to be made difficult in order to encourage people to actually reward the artists of songs or tv programs they like.
These guys are dumber than dirt.
Why charge at all for outdated content? Don't they remember the old journalistic saying that today's news is tomorrow's fishwrap?
Put the archives up for free -- that way people will link into them and pump up the Times' search-engine juice. Then sell context sensitive advertising on the old stories a la Google AdWords. Hell, the Times has an entire ad staff -- they could come up with their own contextual-ads program, cut out Google, and keep all the money for themselves. And advertisers would pay a pretty penny to get placed -- you don't think a spot on a NYT story about bicycles, say, would be attractive to a bicycle manufacturer? Especially if that story wasn't behind a paywall, so it got enough Google-juice to get pumped up to the first page of search results for "bicycles"?
I bet they'd make an order of magnitude more money that way than they ever would off selling subscriptions to the archives...
Read my blog.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
from the frog-boiling dept. You got that right! This is making me hopping mad!
If you haven't read the WSJ on a regular basis, you don't realize what you're missing. I had a microeconomics professor require us to subscribe and read it daily, and I must say I was better informed about things that I had ever been in my life. It beats radio, television and most other newspapers by huge margins.
Also, the problem with self-selecting news it that you risk becoming ignorant and closed to things you don't already have an interest in.
What does this imply about internet advertising? Do paid subscribers also get ads along with the online content? This seems like another indication that on-line ads may not pay out.
Yorkspace
I see this as completely reasonable.
I feel like news outlets almost have a civic responsibility to have (at least some level of) news for free for the masses just for the sake of keeping various entities "in check" --mainly government and business.
However, at some point news at a week old isnt "news" anymore. Think about the majority of the types of people that need archived news articles -- researchers, other news writers, authors, statisticians etc. In my opinion these type of people who work for other companies or work for other interests and whose existence piggybacks at least a little bit on news articles that are archived should pay their fair share. I don't see too many private citizen's need to access archieved news.
Also, one should view this as a exponential growing cost of bandwidth and storage space for archived articles (especially for the NYTimes with a hundred years of history and the sheer amount of content that they have) not necessarily as a main revenue stream for breaking news.
But thats just my $0.02
This is worrying because the NYT is considered one of the 'most reputable' newspapers in the world. For example: I do a bit of work for The Center for Cooperative Research. This is an open source website that is designed to create timelines about US politics by following news stories. To make the timelines as 'legitimate' as possible, we are encouraged to use NYT articles. Now that public access is restricted, it is making it more difficult for this open source project to continue with broad 'legitimacy'.
This is my last post.
[6th Estate]
Screw that, 9.99 or even 19.99 might be feasable. But for 49.99 I could get a lot of things. And current news via the ineternet isn't that hard to find without the NYT.
If you have a NYC public library card you can access the past year for free via NYPL.org
I'll just search Google News and then reference the cache.
"...$49.99 for unlimited access to anything in the last year"
I would be a bit more inclined to pay for a news service, if I had access to an archive that could go back a little further than a year.
But wouldn't the past articles be avaliable at your local library for free? I mean, if you really wanted to read NYT and do not have the additional means, going to your good old library is a possible solution. I think I remember what they look like...lots of books, newspaper organizers.....
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
I subscribe to the WSJ online, and have for a while. I usually read the WashPost online, but since you can't pay for the online content, I still get a dead tree version. I pay around 28/month to get it delivered. I still like the dead tree version (of the Post), but I read a lot more of the content online, and would probably go strictly online, if they had a subscription model. And I do know that I can get the Journal free by swiping a copy from the mail room, and I only have to go to Starbucks to get a free used copy of the Post that someone left lying around, but it's a resource that I value, and I'm willing to support it if I can.
I don't think it would appeal to the average consumer - 50 bucks a year, 3 bucks an article, both sound about the same to me - as in, sounds like I won't be reading that article - but I wonder if NTY even believes it would. For a research reference, it could be well worth it though. I could see political campaigns, lobbyists, PR agencies, a lot of different things finding a $50 fee well worthwhile for being able to get that instant access online to the NYT archives.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
In other news: Bob, local postman and fishing buff, will be stopping by the Piggly-Wiggly at 4pm EST to pick up milk. He will procede immediately home. Rumors that Bob would be at Pop's Tavern were quickly denounced by Bob. He assures us he will indeed be purchasing milk and then going home. Back to you in the studio, Jane!
This seem like a giant leap backward to me. Everything I've ever read seems to suggest that micropayments are the way forward (pay for what you use - hell, I'd certainly like it), and here the NYT are moving to a less granular pricing model.
Subscriptions are stupid, because unless you're going to use $50/year you aren't going to bother taking out a subscription, and will instead go elsewhere. Subscriptions force you to make a choice: am I "A NYT Subscriber" or not? If I'm just dropping by the NYT site (eg, from a random newsblog link), I'm not going to fork out a $50.00 subscription to view a single article. Could I view that same single article for, say, $0.25, I'd happily pay it.
Affordable (and truly micro) micropayments allow you to use what you want, when you want, so you can "impulse-buy" information however you want. Subscriptions force you to enter into a long-term commitment, and as such will be avoided liek the plague by everyone apart from those who likely *already* have a NYT subscription (a much smaller subset of users).
Ok, $3.00 per article is hardly micropayments, but if I were NYT I'd be looking to move towards MPs, rather than away from them. It does look like they're confusing "overpricing their content" with "the failure of their whole approach".
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
The numbers are in the right ballpark. I pay $35/yr to get access to all of their current and archived crosswords and puzzles. I have no problem paying this amount since I consider it to be of value to me. If you don't consider their week-old online content to be worth X dollars, don't pay them X dollars.
As the NYT continues not only to loose relevance because of bad reporting, they want to start charging? Oh, my. How fast does the NYT want to fade into oblivion.
I no longer visit the NYT site because I don't like registering to read the news. I get news from many sites. Some 'mirror' NYT articles. That said, to me the NYT has already reached a point of irrelevance to me. So - Let them charge away. In 10 years (or less) we'll see if their business model is successful or not.
With the NYTimes vast news archive they have the potential to be one of the best sources of past and current news via google.
Remember, google is based on linking. Right now, no one links to the NYTimes unless it's today's article. If they allowed free access to their entire past archive, people would be posting links all the time (ex, an anti-Bush site would have a series of links about him from the past few years). This would translate into advertising revenue for the Times and more internet clout in general.
The way they've set it up now, this doesn't exist. And I don't believe there is a big market for paying for old news (not that big anyway). Students and researchers use libraries, people at home use Wikipedia or whatever.
The NYTimes should be working to be THE information news resource of world events.
Here Finland, we have a saying:
It's not the person who asks who is stupid. It's the person who pays.
In the offline world, newspapers and magazines charge for the current issues while the archives are freely available through libraries. Why should it be reversed in the online world?
It's completely backwards to make the current week free and the archives Pay-per-view or subscription-only. It makes much more sense to charge a subscription to the current news (whether to access the current day, the current week, or the current month), and make the older stuff freely available. First of all, there's a lot more people interested in today's news than in last year's news, meaning revenues would be higher. (That means more money for the low IQers in the audience.) It fits in line with the offline business model. It meets the customer's expectations better. And it makes the whole site more Internet-friendly.
Frankly, I don't understand why more sites don't follow that plan. Charge for access to the current week (the most valuable content on your site on any given day) and, after that, let the bloggers and everyone else have at it for free.
Google cache
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/02/22 15203&tid=98&tid=95&tid=17
Once again, something that Something Awful (at least their forum archives) has already been doing. Nothing new here.
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
Whenever I see an article that grabs my interest, I print make a PDF copy of it, and then later on I send it to my gmail account with meaning description in the subject line.
Not perfect, but perfectly workable for most.
It strikes me that the internet is like street performance. You make a noise. If people like the noise you should provide a simple system for people to provide a small sum of money.
Surely this is the business model that should be adopted by the arts on the internet. People already earn a living busking, and thats just performing on a busy high street, with the internet there is the potential to busk to the world.
Accountants may hate this model, but with the huge variety of GDPs and age ranges that have access to the internet it appears the fairest
Just to be clear Busking is an English word for street performer (not sure if our American friends use it).
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
i wouldn't give the NYT a dime until they drop charges against Adrian Lamo
Why would I pay for any NY Times news story when I can get the same story direct from the source for free.
[Insert pithy quote here]
The problem is they want a single subscription option, which is wrong. I'm not going to pay $50 for a single article I wanted to read but missed. I won't pay $2.50/article if I'm performing a summary research, requiring me to analyse 5000 different articles. Maybe a year back is not enough for me? Maybe it's way too much, as I want to make some monthly digests?
A good range of options is a reasonable choice. Another reasonable choice is "pay per kilobyte" with bulk discounts. A single $50/unlimited access option won't attract too many customers.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Why should I pay? How about I just goto the library and pull out the article
One of these people who's time is worthless. For the rest of us, spending $50 for 1 year's access is a better deal than spending an hours time going to the library for an article.
The NYTimes is in a difficult position.
If they charge for subscription, they are in danger of losing a vast portion of their readership, and no longer be the paper of record (well, they may still be the Paper of Record, but the distinction won't be important. They will no longer be the News Source of Record). They are competing with AP, Reuters and the BBC in this realm, all of which will continue to pump out all the international news anyone could hope for.
If the NYTimes hopes to justify the expense by touting it's higher-quality product, it will have to explain how it's reporting standards are lower then the WSJ and magazines like The Economist, both of which have far better reporting then The Gray Lady.
The price isn't horrible in the abstract, it's that the paper isn't worth the price. I often consider subscribing to the WSJ at $70/year. It is possible that one of the main reasons I don't subscribe is that the NYTimes is available for free. If the NYTimes starts charging, the result, for me, would probably be a subscription to the WSJOnline.
So, in order to compete with the WSJ, the NYTimes may be forced to improve it's product. That is not a bad thing, at all. Although it will be a lot of work, the NYTimes has a better chance of reaching a $50/yr value then most other online news sources.
So, will the NYT also charge fishmongers selling their wares in old newspaper?
Oh well, what the hell...
If I can find porn passwords online, I think it would be fairly easy to find some NYT passwords once they do this. Then it's just a matter of hoping they don't enlist the services of Pennywise Online.
;)
(Pre-verts like me will get that Pennywise reference...
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
Oh, come on, there are still a few people who aren't up-to-date on BugMeNot - do you really want them to have to go to the trouble of creating an account under the name of "Saadam Heussein" or "Jeff 'man-love' Gannon"?
Dear NYT,
I just let my WSJ subscription lapse. Why? because of the total lock-down of discussing the conntent with others. The Economist on the other hand I am renewing, even though most of the content is free. Why? I value the content, and the material is open for others to see, with the exception of specific business intelligence.
Where do you stand dear NYT? I would say with the Economist. If you keep the news free, open up the past, and charge for all of the other stuff--arts, magazine...--I would likely pay and more importantly, continue to pay.
Do not do focus groups on this! Find out the retention rate--renewals--for these publications, and find the model that fits. Lets hope that it's not the WSJ! One year relationships suck.
This will be one of the last gasps for air from the dieing corpse. Media delivery, content, and useage is dramaticly changing. The old line will fail and the new will emerge.
However, this is not new news. But it is on all the new and old media, including this one.
The big question, and the new news, is how these giants re-invent them selves and become the new giants, and whether or not they are able to. That is the real story.
The NY Times is one of the most reputable papers in the US. But, if you want the paper that most foreigners turn to for impartial, unbiased news, check out the Christian Science Monitor. As right-wing as the paper sounds, it is actually quite impartial (this coming from a liberal).
Fifty dollars for only the last year is far too steep. For $50/year, I'd want online access to the entire archives of the NYT back to the beginning.
The New York Times has digitized every edition from 1851 to 2001. It's searchable and instead of printing up some plain 'ol text, you see the actual article in PDF as it appeared when published. It's incredible stuff and would be well worth an annual fee for history buffs.
www.lonseidman.com
Registration is required before you can read this comment. I promise, it's a really good comment, and well worth your money. Can't afford it now? Check back in a few weeks, and it will be almost free, or feel free to send me $50 now, and you can view all of my comments for the next year.
This sig has been removed pending an investigation.
I hope they can make a go of it.
Everyone is a monday morning quarterback when it comes to journalism, but what most people don't realize is that good journalism is hard. Like, really hard. Exhausting. The workflow of a journalist is: conceive of story; research story, find sources, interview sources; write story. You do this independently, usually with little or no help from your editor. If you're in the news department, you do this in one day, sometimes multiple times in a day. And you repeat this every day you're at work. It's really, really hard, and lots of people burn out.
This is a little bit like a manager saying to a coder, "Can you build me a killer app? How long will that take - a few days maybe?" No matter what people on the sidelines think of the profession, getting into the NY Times means being a journalist at the top of your game. They should be paid well, and the paper has every right to generate revenue in whatever way they can.
Yes you get quality news in Slashdot and blogs. You wanna know why? Because there is critique. Maybe the article itself might be leaning one way or another, but the comments will provide the necessary explanations or corrections.
I find Slashdot fascinating because of the comments. Yes there are idiots, but there are also very intelligent people making intelligent comments. Where do you get that in newspapers? Newspapers have a single editor (or small team) with certain slants.
Take for example anything that Fox news produces. There is a slant in their news. Can anybody critique the comments Fox news has made? No, because they control the medium and the reactions. With Slashdot and Blogs that is simply not the case. Slashdot and blogs represent the voices of the people! And after all is that not what the news is all about, the people?
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
50 a year for online access to the NY Times and a one year archive? Sign me up. I think that's a great deal. Now where that opinion might change is if they pound me with ads on top of the 50 bucks, ala Tivo. Then, yeah, explore other news sources. Even if it was 50 on top of a 15/month online subscription...I still think that's a pretty good deal. Especially if you can do topical searches. Wow, what a resource.
$2.95 an article is a joke. I'm surprised they ever thought that would work.
Really though, if you're not that interested in the Times all that well then 50 bucks wouldn't be worth it. But if you can get it the same day, that's not bad. I'll pay for information resources if I get value for the $$. But if I have to pay to get a full slew of online ads, then they can kiss my big hairy butt.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Online for up to half the cost of the print medium (7-day in-city subscription rate), and here's why:
I can only get delivery at $3/week sunday only - that's $150 per year for one day a week's paper.
They have to put the whole thing online somewhere anyway, that's how newspapers are made today (I still like to think it's Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell doing it all at high volume, but alas...) They've already paid the mortgage on the infrastructure, the part of it that makes things public html costs not as much as all of the tech they need in order to get the paper out every day. This is a lot like the phone companies cutting prices once everyone saw the internet model and realized that they didn't have to run a special/new wire from my house in CT to so-and-so in CA so we could talk. They don't have to wake someone up to create a web page just because I logged on.
They won't get a lot of people who are online-y to cart a pile of paper home no matter how attractive they seem to make it. (and "attractive" seems to mean raise the out of town prices to horriffic levels - how come USAToday costs the same all over the country but NYT seems to be delivered outside of NYC by gold-plated burros who eat caviar? Hint - distributed printing)
So I'll (and lots like me'll) will get their news online somewhere, but not at paper-based prices and weights.
They'll have me at up to half subscription rate. There's a sweet spot there somewhere. It's fair, it's not the smug "information wants to be free" half of the argument. Maybe it's a mexican standoff, but they won't get me at print, and I can get news lots of places for free.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Interestingly, I recently read an article (maybe even here on slashdot) about the WSJ's online service and how they are getting serious competition by Forbes.
With WSJ's subscription service, their content doesn't get indexed by the search engines, so anyone looking for business news in Google is more likely to get links to the Forbes site. This fact has helped increase Forbes market share in the business publication arena.
Bottom line is a subscription based model is not always the best if you want to increase your web traffic. The company I worked for ran a small monthly newsletter for our customers for a few years. You had to be a customer with a login/password to access it. During some SEO work we decided to move all of our old newsletters into a free archive that could be indexed. Worked like a champ.
Find coupons in Greeley
I'm gonna go start my own newspaper... with liquor... and hookers!
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
and a cron job can get you an unlimited supply of the NYT? Why delete when you have so much hardisk space? I wonder if this kind of subscription is feasible in the first place.
Obviously, New York City is a very expensive place to live in and/or conduct a business. Trying to make that chum change, thats all.
$50 a year is ok if you read one newspaper, as people did in the good old days. Today, I read at least 7 online papers every day. When there is something special going on, I look for newspapers in the region. That is not counting things like slashdot, which I read for entertainment value.
What the NYT does with their relatively high prices and nosy registration is narrow their audience. Perhaps that is what they are trying to do, or perhaps they are stuck in the days when an informed person defined themselves by which newspaper they read.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
I think this is partly true. The idea of the timelines is that nobody could look at them and say: "oh, these sources are all communist propaganda, so therefore I don't need to listen."
The beauty of the Center for Cooperative Research is that by collecting news stories from over a long period of time you can build timelines which in fact aren't based on liberal preconceptions, but on rational, critical thought. In this way, liberal contradictions are revealed by their own media.
This is my last post.
[6th Estate]
I'd certainly pay $50/yr for access to the archives. I read the NYTimes daily online, from work, and love it. And I get the print version at home. But there's many times I'm talking to someone about something, or I see something happen in the world, and I think "hey wasn't there a NYT article on that"? But then I can't get to the article without paying $2.95/article for articles older than a week, or whatever they currently charge. Which... I'm not going to do. Somewhere in the $30-50/yr range for unlimited access to the archives seems reasonable to me though.
-Daniel
I would imagine most of those places already subscribe to lexis-nexis of one of the other research databases. Which raises the question, why would the New York Times keep older stories online anyway? just put up a link, "If you want an older story to to lexis-nexis." I'm sure the answer is that they get a bigger cut if they do it themselves but, as others have noted, the market for people who are doing casual research and don't already have access to a research database seems pretty small.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
the onion has an issue archive membership.. around $30 a year I think. I'm tempted to get it just for the halloween checklist they released a couple years ago. "Pack your childs anus with razor blades to ward off would be molesters." or something like that. hehehehahahahah.
These digitally delivered magazines are obviously trying too hard to replicate a dead tree version - and the internet and page reading/linking habits are not dead trees. I don't want to replicate the flow of page by page reading of the print version because there's no reason to do that online. If an article is 'continued on page xx', I shouldn't have to click or flip to keep reading - too much navigation. All article content should be on one page, top to bottom, that I can read at once, all accessed from a single menu page. If I want to read a print version of a magazine in that exact format, I'll go sit at Borders or B&N for an hour and have some coffee while I 'borrow' their newsstand copies.
But then there's the problem of replicating their advertising model or having to completely re-do the ad formatting to retain that advertising revenue stream. With Zinio or the like, full page ads are intact just as they are in print, can't block them with adblock etc. If they did have to reformat into typical HTML or whatever for the 'online' edition (which costs time and money), then they will end up having a completely different ad presentation mechanism to work out. Full/half etc. page ads are no longer deliverable as paid for in the print model, you have all the effort of creating typical discrete online ad units which will then likely be blocked with whatever tool. So in the end, it's just cheaper and easier to just dump the print version into PDF or Flash or whatever and just be done with it.
But ultimately it's still a kludge, and hard to read on a screen, so I don't think Zinio-like delivery is the right approach. Yeah, you could always just print the pages of interest and take 'em with you on the subway, but at that point I'd just access the existing print one anyway.
I get my news from a wide variety of places. Why lock into one source where you don't get the other side of a story. But the lemmings here don't want to hear that. ANYTHING the NY Times, Wash Post, etc.. puts out is FACT - including their VERY left leaning editorial pages.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
The Slashdot "info should be free" crowd is dead wrong on this. Certainly that would be best for YOU the consumer, but not best for NYT, which is point of the article. There is no reason to make the archives free since the paper itself is already free.
Who is their audience? Researchers who are generally looking for one specific article, and people who need the resources often. I think they should do both plans, and probably more - a monthly plan, a subscription to just one section (like "Business section" for $15 a year), etc. But I think the single articles will sell more, at around a 4 to 1 ratio to subscriptions.
Remember also the unlimited year pass is just for the previous year. NYT has quite lucrative contracts with Lexis Nexus and others which obviously makes them good money and obviously charges a steep amount for access. They might not even be legally able to "go free" with the archives depending on their contracts.
I can see an interesting side effect coming up if NYT decides to do this, especially at the cost figure they're proposing.
Specifically, I could see a move like this being a shot in the arm for public libraries, especially if it sparks other newspapers and news agencies to do it.
Consider: You could either pay the fee and access the thing from your home system, or you can exert a little effort and hit up your local public library. Access to the same material would (likely) be at no extra cost to you. Heck, you wouldn't even have to pay for gas if you took public transit.
Even if, for some reason, you still need Internet access, many libraries have free wireless. The Seattle main (downtown) library, as one example, has both wired and wireless Internet access available at no charge to its patrons (note that VPN only works if you use Cisco LEAP or Microsplatt's PPTP).
Keep the peace(es).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
One of the problems that the NYT is facing is that we no longer live in an age where information is scarce.
Up until a few years ago, regular, in-depth, quality information about what was going on in the world was only available to the average person through a few sources - The daily newspaper was chief among these sources followed by radio, tv, and magazines.
Now, with internet access becoming ubiquitous people have more news/information than they can deal with. We are practically drowning in media. The question is: Why would we want to subscribe to another source of information?
There is a niche for the NYT. That niche is in limiting and filtering information. The paper needs to market itself as a relief from information overload.
NYT to sue the NYPL over providing free news online...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
It's all about customer segregation. The normal folks who just want to stay up-to-date on the news won't pay for a subscription. Instead NYT relies on advertising with the added value of registration for better demographics. People who want to look at older articles are more likely to be professionals. They are doing research of one kind or another. They journalists, historians, politicians, and pundits. These folks are more likely to pay and it would be stupid for NYT to leave that money on the table. All of this talk about bandwidth costs and storage costs is really quite silly.
This is really just supply and demand with a high fixed cost. NYTs knows very few are going to pay $2.95 for an article. But, they have to host all the articles, just in case. Therefore, they have to have the infrastructure to support the outside chance it will be used. That drives the high price.
Of course another economic model with supply and demand, would be to use a low price to spread the fixed costs out over a larger base. Unfortunately, that method, while better in the long run, has a longer ROI.
They should bring their hosting systems in house to reduce costs --after all isn't hosting the modern day form of publishing? This would cut overhead. add better interpage advertising and I would think they should have little problem being profitable.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Thank you. For far too long people have tried to cast old media (film, print, audio) as being in the "content" business, but this is absurd. People can and have created quality content (even pre-web) completely outside of the infrastructure of old media. All these companies really own is manufacturing, distribution, and most importantly placement rights (the ability to drop their physical product in the right places).
These firms are in fact in the manufacturing and distribution business, which is been made totally redundant by the web, which is why they will die.
People need to get over their hang-up that only the NYT, WSJ etc can report the news. Reuters AP etc all provide quality reporting (which is why their articles constitute over 50% of the content of every newspaper), and this content is widely available on the web. The NYT is neither deeper (more intellectual) or broader (more variety) than most other news sources these days.
But $50 for unlimited access to anything in the past year sounds pretty good. Sure, nothing can beat Lexis-Nexus, but LN is EXPENSIVE -- and they only store text. If the NYT deal offered pictures, and maybe archived AP content, $50/year sounds like a good deal to me.
I predict that what will happen is, as the remaining paper-copy subscribers die out, newspapers will be forced to charge online somehow. I think the most feasible model will be a package model, where you subscribe to a main service and get NYTimes, Boston Globe, whatever.. but a bunch of stuff available as 'channels' if you will.. similar to a cable TV model.. People wont find it cost-effective to subscribe for a single fee to just the NY Times, but they would probably pay for a 'basic news' service. This could be extended to cellphones and other mobile devices..
The idea that you divide your readership/audience into those who paid and those who didn't is inevitable but its also anathema to the existence of the internet.
We are about to enter an era of severe commercial Balkanization of the wwweb and maybe the whole of the 'net into smaller and smaller divisions.
Of course that itself is anathema to the concept of advertising on the wwweb where the idea is to reach any and every body's eye balls.
The wider context, the sharing of information, is going to be lost.
The only sites with unpaid presence will be corporations who need one for providing a multi-regional point of contact, because PR babble still needs to go out.
The wwweb and the net will become a much quiter place since the sites who disseminate info, like the NYTimes, will become subscription only.
Content aggregators will limit their own growth but will preserve their 'print' revenues.
Web advertisers will still rely on Spam with dimishing returns as Baysian filters get more and more discrimating.
Oh well, it was interesting while it lasted.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Given what you say, what's needed is a way to distinguish researchers who consider the subscription cost a business expense, from casual users like myself who read random NYT articles of random age, most typically because they were linked from somewhere else.
One method that came to mind is to make access to the articles themselves free, but make their *searchability* a paid function. Presumably this would mean that external search engines would have to be denied access, so there would be fewer random users linking/reading articles.
At that point, it behooves them to run the numbers for "ad impressions seen by random-user eyeballs" vs the relative rarity of "paying researcher looking for some specific and obscure topic".
Another thought: a new advertising model, which would target random-users by location. Offer inexpensive "classified" style online ads that are regionalized, and whenever I log in, show me a link to the classifieds that are specific to my area. I personally would find this very useful (and might even use it as a small advertiser), and I'm sure I'm not alone. As a small box of a few basic "links to major classified sections for your area" it also would be unobtrusive and would work in any browser (two reasons I use NYTimes.com in the first place -- it works for my preferred older browser, and it doesn't make my eyes bleed). In short, sortof like Google TextAds, except specific to the NYTimes.
Or, hell, why reinvent the wheel, why not just partner with Google for that??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
forgive me for being too phylosophical about the Internet but...
If the Internet is about a free and imediate exchange of global information, and internet search engines are leading us towards internet archives, does requiring a subscription to access content ensure that that very content will not be archived by the greater Internet body of knowledge?
If $50 a year gets you access to NYT articles since 1851, what happens in another 154 years when many more NYT articles are not in the Google archives?
NYT and others will have to provide some way to plug in their par-to-view archives with the greater Google archives in the year 2159 to get all that content from 300 years ago.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
If you are disturbed by people criticising all reporters, and dismissing their work, then you should ask yourself why they do so.
I have been on the scenes of stories that were reported on. Never did I find the reporting to be fair. It wasn't always biased in a "political agneda" manner, but it was always so biased as to make the report nearly unrecognizable. The bias I normally detected was "Make this more entertaining! More SHOCK!!". This was done in the cases I observed by what was selected. Carefully chosen camera angeles, carefully worded stories. Generally each individual point could be referred back to something that was actually happening, but the entire effect was one massive lie.
After a couple of events like that, I started being a lot more skeptical of news I didn't witness. After the fourth I started nearly discounting it. (Sometimes there IS political bias that choses what to eliminate. And that's nearly impossible to detect without witnessing the actual event.)
My conclusion has been that professional news is generally lies disguised as a plausible verisimilitude of the truth. I will grant you that I have overgeneralized. I don't have the luxury of a large sample size. I will grant you that I don't know whether the processing was done by reporters, editors, or publishers. But that doesn't really matter. What matters is that it happens.
If you want reporters to be respected, reform the news services into respectability...and don't just lie and pretend that it *is* respectable. That's been done too often in the past. I, for one, won't start believing the news until I happen to be on the scene of an event and I find it reported accurately. After a that happens a few times, I may start beginning to trust the news again. (Expect the process to take decades. "Newsworthy" events don't happen frequently.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
My touchstone for ethical new is the "Weekly World News". I can always tell which stories to trust.
The rest of the news is probably in the same category, but it's more difficult to be certain. (If you doubt this, be on the scene of some news event and then watch what gets reported.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Compare this with other online newpaper websites, for instance - AZCentral (which is the online version of the Arizona Republic). Take a look at their prices for their archived articles.
* Single-article purchase - $2.50
* 24-hour pass, 10 articles - $9.95
* 3-article pack - $6.95
Good for one week from purchase.
* 10-article pack - $21.95
Good for one month from purchase.
* 25-article pack - $49.95
Good for one month from purchase.
* 40-article pack - $79.95
Good for one month from purchase.
Doing long-term research?
* 500-article pack - $995
Good for one year from purchase.
* 1,000-article pack - $1,995
Good for one year from purchase.
And this is just for a local paper! NewsLibrary.com, the "go-between" for the AZCentral archives, boasts 694 newspapers and other news sources that you can search - for a price.
The New York Times archives look like a deal compared to those.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
Do they sell this stuff on CD or DVD? that, I might be interested in...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Piggly-Wiggly, lordy, I haven't seen one of those since moving west. Tho we usually shopped at Red Owl. Where did they get such names anyway? :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I like plain, simple information. I like reading it from multiple sources. I eschew editorial content, and hence avoid a lot of blatently biased sources.
If the NYT wants to squeeze their readership, they will lose some, but not all. It's a losing game, given that news, as information, wants to be free. Most of what the NYT publishes aren't secrets.
Will I let Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc put blinky ads on my web pages (and then filter them out?) why...yes! Someone is paying for the information delivery. I certainly wouldn't.
Do I pay for the NPR my radio spits out, or listen to the commercials on other talk radio? Sure, since I appreciate the convenient delivery mechanism.
So why not let *some* folks send money to newspapers for writing the same 'ole thing? Because of *freedom of choice* to get information as you want it. Wrapped in opinion or printed as paper, nobody should really care.
mug
Google allows websites to opt out of caching through a META tag. The New York Times uses this feature. After a week or so, most articles on their website change into a one-paragraph teaser.
It's the New York Times! What dope is being smoked and by who? New York Times. If the best defense you can make of a broken clock is that it is right twice a day, then this isn't even a broken clock. The last time I tried reading it, my head hurt from the psychic whiplash. It makes the leftist rag The Hartford Courant look like it was ghostwriten by R. Emmet Tyrell, Jr.
My eyes nearly popped out of my head when I saw the prices quoted. If we go by this as a yardstick, then access to just the headers of Slashdot stories should be $50,000 a pop. Heck, Something Awful is more informative than the NYT.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Note that libraries, universities, and other research-intensive institutions can already buy subscription access to the archives of the New York Times and most other major newspapers.
My university pays NYT a considerable fee for access to several years of archives from any computer on the campus network. This new subscription policy is really just an attempt to sell that kind of service to individuals instead of institutions.
Nope. I typed T and I meant T. Your mistake.
somebody pulls the whole archive with a couple of accounts, rars it up and posts it to usenet.
/crisper
Which is how a lot of people get all of their good reading material cause they are poor and can't afford books.
How does usenet get away with it still? Last I heard there was a case, which I haven't found but haven't really searched for on google, which supposedly protects usenet providers. What case was this etc etc if anyone knows?
These "professional" journalists at the NYT are just making shit up as they go along, anyhow.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent