Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Now we can actually read all those articles that are lined from Slashdot!
You can get the article here.
Money for nothing, pix for free
There are such things as libraries, though. The San Francisco Public Library, for one, offers access to a complete online newspaper archive that includes the New York Times in addition to many other papers. The deal is, you have to punch in your library card number to access it. After that, though, you can read, save, and print all those articles that the Times purportedly keeps under lock and key.
The fact that most people don't even know this makes me fearful for the future of libraries.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
"If they opened up the archives, their website would instantly become *A LOT* more useful."
Sigh. But not to this crowd, who can't be bothered with reading beyond the headlines. From the FA:
Starting on Wednesday, access to the archives will be available for free back to 1987, and as well as stories before 1923, which are in the public domain, Schiller said.