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New York Times Ends Its Paid Subscription Service
Mike writes "The New York Times has announced that it will end its paid Internet service in favor of making most of its Web site available for free. The hope is that this move will attract more readers and higher advertising revenue. 'The longer-term problem for publishers like the Times is that they must find ways to present content online rather than just transferring stories and pictures from the newspaper. Most U.S. news Web sites offer their contents for free, supporting themselves by selling advertising. One exception is The Wall Street Journal which runs a subscription-based Web site. TimesSelect generated about $10 million in revenue a year. Schiller declined to project how much higher the online growth rate would be without charging visitors.'"
If they opened up the archives, their website would instantly become *A LOT* more useful.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Putting your most influential op-ed writers behind a pay wall is a sure way to make their voices irrelevant in the Internet age.
I do not believe all information on the internet is supposed to be free (in terms of price). Wayyy back in the 90's before the internet was mainstream I had a paid subscription to NY Times, even though they were 2-3 times more expensive than my local paper, because I felt the quality was so much greater and was willing to pay for that quality. The newspaper still had ads from revenue back then, but I still had to pay for it and was willing to do so.
Fast forward to today and I still believe that - the news quality of a NY Times piece is still premium quality, but the difference now is that the news is 100% paid for by advertisers. My conscience is making me turn off my browser's adblocker plugin when I go to NY Times's website now.
I left America several years ago to live in London and one of the few things I miss was the straight to the point of dull news from the New York Times and their thought-provoking columnists. Putting a third of the paper - and the most unique elements of the paper - behind a paid wall seemed to be a one-way ticket to irrelevance. I can read wire stories for free anywhere, but the editorial and op-ed pages really do influence the American national discourse - keep them open-access for all to read, discuss (or completely dismiss and ignore).
"The longer-term problem for publishers like the Times is that they must find ways to present content online rather than just transferring stories and pictures from the newspaper."
Why?
For chrissakes, no matter what you think of the paper as a journalistic entity, nor what you think of its editorial decisions, nor what you think of its columnists, it really is the newspaper of record for the United States.
They have an extraordinary breadth of content. Why can't they just "copy stories and pictures from the newspaper"? If anyone in the media business would be able to generate bulk traffic (read: advertising $$) from sheer content without any particular bells and whistles, it would be the website that simply mirrors the staggering amount of content from the NYT.
Add to that a searchable archive of the NYT going back to the beginning, and I frankly can't think of a single media outlet in the world that could match it for comprehensive historical information on daily events pertinent to the United States.
Huge content, daily updates, impeccable credentials - yeah, who'd imagine THAT could draw significant pageviews?
-Styopa
I'd agree that The New York Times tries to appear to be left wing, and on inconsequential matters it may succeed, but mongering for war the last time I checked was definitely not a liberal persuasion.
It isn't just the constant news coverage citing "unnamed sources" in an effort to implicate this or that group of Muslims in various imagined transgressions, even after they promised to swear off using unnamed sources, it's deciding to wait until after the 2004 election to tell us about Bush's illegal wiretapping, or not telling us about the 9-11 Commission Report citing American support for Israeli atrocities against Palestinians as the reason for the attack, or continually over-reporting acts of violence committed by Muslims against Jews while under-reporting acts of violence committed by Jews against Muslims (did you know that Israelis have killed nearly four times as many Muslims as vice versa? My point exactly.)
When you put it all together -- and by no means is the above a comprehensive list of their transgressions -- a picture emerges of a paper driven by racism and allegiance to Israel above all things, including America.
Everybody goes on about the corporate media when talking about media support for this war, well, here's some news: The New York Times is by far the worst offender in this regard, and it isn't corporate-owned at all! It's a family paper.
Ad Block them. Starve the war machine. Kill the propaganda machine before it succeeds in killing us.
The New York Times is indeed right-wing, and Fox News even more so. There are no mainstream left-wing newspapers in the USA anymore.