Slashdot Mirror
NY Times To Charge For Online Content
Hugh Pickens writes "New York Magazine reports that the NY Times appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of debate inside the paper, the choice has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system. The decision to go paid is monumental for the Times, and culminates a yearlong debate that grew contentious, people close to the talks say. Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times' last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year's financial crisis, the argument that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper's high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight."
Oh well, I just won't bother reading it then. I will read www.bbc.co.uk or www.telegraph.co.uk or theregister.co.uk or www.zeit.de or cnn.com or slashdot.org or www.dailymail.co.uk or and the list goes on.
So now I'll probably never read another New York Times article.
*heads to news.google.com*
Plenty of other newspapers still providing content for free...
You were significantly less full of crap than other newspapers. We will miss you. :'-(
I dont know the details but does any one else have a macabre interest in whats going to happen to the NY times.
New York Times files for Bankruptcy..President is befuddled heard commenting why wouldn't people want tp give us their money, we're not CNN or Google News, were the New York Times!
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
i'll miss you. then again, i'll have a lot more free time.
The New York Times can make an effective paywall because they hold the rights to columnists that share opinions that are nationally relevant. Local NY city news is covered by other papers, so they need exclusive content like the book reviews and bestseller lists.
WSJ has business opinions. Nobody's going to pay for press releases restated, or the S&P 500 values... but reviews and opinions are still worth something.
Can your local paper do that when your local TV station has a newsroom covering the same topics and also posting to the web for free? Nope. I don't really care what's going on in local high school sports, and that's about that's exclusive to my local paper.
Newspapers provide an important role in our society, particularly the larger papers such as this, the Boston Globe, Washington Post, etc. I never appreciated this more than when I lived in Arizona several years ago and realized, not to diminish the efforts of the good folks of AZ, but the quality of material was just not quite the same. With more and more newspapers just printing press releases and less original content, this becomes of great concern, and should for everyone who lives in the US, as papers often go out on their own to investigate political corruption, businesses acting unethically, etc. For the larger newspapers, this results in things such as Watergate, etc.
I am not a big fan of paying for any online subscription, and to contradict myself I am not sure I would for this (I pay for a regular Boston Globe as my own attempt to try and keep the journalist machine going), but somehow, I still wish for them to be successful. Like their own struggles, I have no idea what the obvious answer is. If you value similar, I am not saying pay for the NYT, but I recommend finding something you are willing to put a few dollars into every month, even if its just your local Sunday paper.
These days, I get all my news from either FARK, Slashdot, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or The Colbert Report. So, with the New York Times going to a pay site, it just means that none of the aforementioned sites that I keep an eye on will link to them anymore, so they'll eventually die off. The same thing happened with the Wall Street Journal, too -- they're not even on my radar anymore (Thanks, Rupert!)
I honestly don't know what they are doing to cut costs - but if they believe they are becoming a "global newspaper of record" - then maybe they ought to cut ties with New York. I'm sure doing business in NYC ain't cheap - do they really need an entire building in midtown Manhattan? I could see an office - something like what they presumably have in DC - as a place for reporters who are literally on the local beat to do officey type things. But I'm willing to bet that the business of running the paper could be done just as well from the booneys as in the middle of the big apple for a whole lot less. Sure. you'd lose some die-hard manhattanite employees, but nobody's irreplaceable - especially when the world is changing as fast as the publishing world is...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It obviously depends how much they try to charge, but I'll probably sign up for this. I really like reading the NYT (I actually live in NYC) - they provide an incredibly valuable service, which at the moment they basically give away. Realistically, though, I don't really buy the things they advertise. Half the time when I'm reading their site, it's on a computer with adblock installed so I don't even *see* the ads they have up. I was all about the "everything should be free" movement when I was a student, but now that I have a job, I don't mind compensating people for their work. Especially if the alternative is a world where the only 'news' comes from crappy bloggers that can't spell or do legitimate research.
I'm perfect in every way, except for my humility.
Didn't they try that before.
They built it and nobody came.
I didn't bother reading it until it was free.
Reading for a fee, I'll skip it again.
There is more than enough free content and they aren't producing enough interesting content.
I can understand the problem.
Most people will read online, but at the same
time few (if any) will click on online ads to
support the sites they view.
I think a time will come when there will be no or
very few full-time journalists, they will all be
part time (the other half will be spent working a 2nd job)
Good luck with that. It works for the WSJ because the WSJ reports actual news; investors will not tolerate op-ed rants being passed off as news because it would make the WSJ worthless for financial analysts. The NYT (and subsidiaries like the Boston Rag, er, Globe) pass off op-eds as news and ignore stories which don't support their biases - such lack of objectivity is not something you are likely to succeed in selling online to people in business. People at home will just tune to CNN and FauxNews for their daily dose of op-eds rather than sit in front of a browser to pay for their spoon-fed propoganda.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Newspapers should edit their own stories twice, once for the hardcopy paper and pay-online and once for free on-line. Every story should be available online for free, but in cropped form. If you visit without registering or paying, you can still get substantial story, but if you want sidebars with historical context, graphs, useful links, and additional quotes and reporting, you need to log in as a paying user or buy it on the newstand. In other words, between 50 and 65 percent of the useful content should be free for all comers, the rest should be premium content.
So, if they now will be behind a paywall, while other media are free, how are they going to convince us about their objectivity? Or why should people pay them?
Chalk this up to the same bad management decisions that got Jayson Blair bylines in the paper. On the Internet, people seem to be largely unwilling to pay for access to content. They figure they pay their ISP already, so they should have access to whatever they want. Whether this is a valid argument or not is up for debate. But the bottom line is, if content providers like the New York Times aren't willing to offer their access to their content for free (usually via an ad-supported model), there's always a dozen other content providers that are willing to provide free access to equivalent services.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
Now I'll get a warning to get away from that garbage before I accidentally read it. Thanks NY Times!
"They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal!"
Now I'll have to start reading FoxNews.com
Good thing you're not in Sweden, here the right-wingers generally do the following (sorry if any swedish right-wingers take offense but seriously, this happens all the time in towns and cities here):
Of course, our left-wing politicians aren't much better but at least when they promise to raise taxes and spend more money they're somewhat honest about their intentions, now if we could only get some politicians who don't think free speech, personal integrity and copyright are minor issues best decided by whatever lobbyist spends the most money on them...
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
That your splash screen "JOIN NOW to read the page behind me" script is easily disabled
The "New York Times" (NYT) also publishes content that is quite good (but is not as good as the content from the WSJ). The NYT will also succeed at charging for its content.
The good things in life are not free. Reporters, columnists, and editors work hard day and night to produce the high-quality content at the WSJ and the NYT. We Slashdotters should not expect that they work for free. Certainly, most Slashdotters will not work for free.
On a side note, a newspaper like the "Sacramento Bee" will not succeed at charging for content. It is mediocre and is not worth any price.
First they came for the free news sites and I said nothing.
rewriting history since 2109
about the death of MSMs.
The rest of the world has been taking its news from blogs and SIGs for years now.
Is it because the Americans believe their newspapers are somehow part of their constitution? I have some news for them - written constitutions don't last more than a few hundred years before society changes so much it makes them irrelevant...
This isn't about compensating journalists or not. It's not like we're currently stealing money from hard working reporters. It's a question about what kind of business model newspapers will have for online content. Not all the free newspapers aren't operating at a loss, because they aren't really free. Instead of charging you to read content, they charge advertisers, who sell adspace in and among the articles. Either way, journalists pay their bills and get fed (they get fed birdseed, but that's a problem that predates the internet by decades). What NYT has found is they can't make the ad driven model cover all their costs, at least how they're doing it now. So, they're trying to make someone else pay for it.
Frankly, this says more about the NYT's inability to have a viable business model. And less about how cheapass the public is.
Who would pay money to read Tom Freidman, the Mustache of Understanding?
Tell you what, though, I get the Sunday NYT delivered to my door every week. I almost quit when they stopped having a separate Books section, but I knew I'd miss the puzzles too much.
Anyway, how else would I get my subliminal liberal marching orders from Comrade Soros? I tried watching Fox News for a while but found myself gaining weight and wanting to do oxycontin. When I asked my wife to wear hairspray and librarian glasses and say "you betcha!" during sex, I knew I had to do something about it. Fortunately, there are liberal re-education camps called "libraries" where you can learn to break the Fox News habit.
After I stopped watching Fox News I lost the weight, and my wife was willing to sleep with me again, but hell, I still want to do me some of that hillbilly heroin.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The NYT will also succeed at charging for its content.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they already try this and find it a dismal failure? I seem to remember I stopped reading any of their articles some years ago when they began some stupid restrictions on access.
The three posts I'm seeing so far all assume this will be the death knell of the Times. But the alternative if nothing changes is for the Times to piss all its money away until it closes its doors in bankruptcy. There has to be a happy medium. Somebody has to try to find it, and that's what the New York Times is doing now.
mrphoton says he'll read www.bbc.co.uk instead. That's all well and good, but the BBC is supported by British taxes, while the New York Times is a private newspaper. There's a strong tradition of separation of media and government in the U.S. and it isn't likely to ever change. But some have proposed operating newspapers as nonprofit organizations, which may be a close compromise. In that arrangement, newspapers would essentially be relying on government to leave them alone, by not charging them taxes. Where their operating expenses would come from, however, remains an open question.
To me, charging subscription fees for access to content makes a lot of sense. One of my favorite publications, The Economist, has always had a pay-wall around most of its content. And while advertising rates for magazines have been dropping across the board, subscriptions to The Economist have actually been climbing in the last few years. Why? Cynics say it's because people want to look intellectual by carrying around a copy of The Economist that they actually never read. People who subscribe to The Economist say they do so because of the marked differences between it and other, more traditional newspapers: The Economist prints zero celebrity gossip, and it never fiddles around with stories about car crashes or green gardening. It has a global focus. Its stories are well-researched, thorough, and not dumbed-down. In other words, if I'm going to pay to have someone deliver a stack of printed pages to my mailbox every week, The Economist will bring me far less wasted paper.
It's also mentioning that The Economist does not print any bylines for its articles. So to Tom Friedman's complaints, cry me a river. Do I subscribe to the New York Times because I want an informative, timely, in-depth news resource, or do I subscribe because I like to read so-called rock star columnists? Personally, I don't even read Tom Friedman's column, because his books have been massive disappointments. Talk about overrated. So should a guy like Tom Friedman be allowed to hold an entire news gathering organization hostage to his own ego? Tell you what, Tom: If you're such a public treasure, start a blog. Surely the people will flock to it. Or could it be that the only reason anybody read your column at all was because of the New York Times, and not the other way around?
The success of a subscription program for the Times' Web site will probably all depend on the price they charge for it. Certainly there will have to be opportunities to get stuff for free, as Salon.com has done. Even The Economist offers a 14-day free trial. Even then, the idea that anyone will pay even a fraction of the cost of a subscription to the New York Times just to read one or two articles a week -- or one or two articles a month -- is nuts. Somebody needs to do the hard research to figure out a realistic rate of payment for the content that people actually read. A monthly or yearly subscription fee, when nothing is showing up in the mailbox and you never remember to go and look at the site, isn't going to work.
At the same time, I worry about the concept of newspapers as a public good. Everyone, no matter their income level, is entitled to know what's going on in their government and the world at large. If newspapers close themselves off only to paying subscribers, you force the economically disadvantaged to venues such as TV news. On the one hand, local TV news has been turned over almost entirely to fluff. On the other, cable outlets like Fox News look increasingly like propaganda weapons.
So what to do? I've long tho
Breakfast served all day!
Friedman is famous for his terrible writing style (see "Flathead": http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html). He does not make any sense. In his book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" he presents Toyota as an example of the efficiency of the free market. Nevermind that Toyota got massive subsidies from the Japanese Government for decades, which makes it an excellent example of the protectionist infant industry argument (as Ha-Joon Chang points out in his book "Bad Samaritans"). He also was a cheerleader for the war in Iraq. This guy's perception of reality is so wrong that you can basically count on the opposite of his predictions to happen. Hmm. On second thought, that makes him really valuable.
This sounds like a bunch of desperate people. What the news industry seams to have lost track of is that the Internet is a new medium, unlike the printing press, radio stations or tv stations it not a business that
Its seems silly to ignore these differences, and I doubt a successful business can be built, with out these issues being taken into account.
Perhaps some kind of low cost strategy, such as articles being written by free lancers (who would be paid on a commission/bonus only basis). There could then be a reply service which would allow another side to the story, giving the people who read the articles the two arguments to judge for them selves. Putting all of this online and allowing people to subscribe to a topic they find of interest (and delivering a individual paper) to your own home every day/week for a fee. This will give you Google like ability to profile users (address plus billing details) along with more effective targeted adverting. Its a lot more complicated than this but its a start.
Of cause this would open up another can of worms (big media is also about control of information)
Is what the heading should have been.
Pay for content? You are having a laugh.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
...and I don't think it's entirely out of greed. The simple truth is that you can't pay columnists, reporters and other staff unless you have sufficient revenue. If people are abandoning the print version of the paper, and advertisers don't see the return they expect from ads, you lose a lot of per-copy revenue and ad revenue.
The truth is that the old model of "sell a paper for $1.00 a day, collect $XM in ad revenue per year, and your profit is that less your employment and other costs" is going away. Now, quality media outlets are faced with a tough choice. (Yes, I know, we can debate quality, but I happen to like the Times.) They have to choose to provide their content free, while only recouping part of their costs from ad sales, or charging for content and hoping enough people like the paper enough to pay.
I see this causing two problems:
For journalism in general: When are people going to realize that actual journalism, investigative reporting, and other well-researched pieces cost money? Call me an old fogey if you want, but I think this transition we're going through is going to make it much tougher to get well-written, well-research, less-biased content. Look at how CNN has jumped in with both feet on the whole Web 2.0/Twitter/Facebook user-generated content. Some of the well-written stuff actually makes the television news, but the vast majority of it is a garbage dump compared to a legitimate news organization. Can you imagine the historical record of the Haitian earthquake filled with stuff like "OMG OMG teh quakez suX0rz dude" ? That's overblown, but you get the idea... Same thing goes for the reporting of both sides of an issue. Would you rather have a news organization making some attempt to neutrally report, or would you rather have the Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh blogs against the ACORN and ELF blogs? Investigative reporting is even more important, and I'm not talking about papparazzi stalking celebrities. Would Watergate have ever been uncovered without a news organization paying to cover it?
For employment: I've seen this kind of rationalization of every single penny of cost happening over the last few years. Outside of journalism, it happens every day...a software developer in India is 10% the cost of a US one, or we can eliminate this raft of manual processes by automating the whole thing. Some of this is good...I'm glad I'm not a file clerk at a huge insurance company, for example. But, it has to stop somewhere. There are some people who need mundane work. Manufacturing used to provide that, now it's gone. Not everyone can be a manager, or sell things, or manage projects. If you eliminate everyone's job, especially those at the low end of the skill spectrum, you're going to have a lot of unemployed consumers who can't buy your product.
Actually, I think it says in general, the public are cheapskates AND the NYT has a non-viable business model.
Still, in a world built on scientific principles, you need to make the odd experiment. NYT are about to experiment with a metered access system. If the results are worrying, then it's time to experiment with the next business model.
There'll be one of three outcomes: They find one that works again, and it's business as usual, or they'll find that there's no business model available that lets them carry on as they are at the moment, so they'll cut corners until they have a compromise that works.. Or finally nothing seems to work, and they run out of money.
The Wallstreet Journal high quality? Bullcrap!
The Wallstreet Journal can do what they are doing because right now those who want the Wallstreet Journal are of that mindset. Even though financial types use computers they are VERY VERY old fashioned when it comes to technology. I know I work in this industry and I am amazed at how far back some of these financial whizz's are.
When the next generation of financial types start trading eg 20 somethings they will not be buying the Wallstreet Journal and it will collapse.
The reality and this is why I moved away from general software development is that the Open Source and free model is not going away. It is here to stay and there is squat anybody can do about it. Open Source killed my software revenues (consulting), Google killed my book revenues, and am I sore? No because you can either fight it, or go with the flow. I decided to go with the flow and offer very specialized knowledge. And it has worked out quite well for me.... By specialized I mean business knowledge.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Which is precisely why I (and apparently many others) pay for access to wsj.com. It's something like $8-12/month. That's well worth it to get access to the in-depth content they provide. Sure, I browse other news sites to scan headlines, and I would probably even be willing to pay for one or two more high-quality sites.
What I will not pay for is a web site that does not provide me with original content, like sites that just aggregate the stuff of the wire, from the AP and Reuters.
I also pay for Slashdot by the way - of course most of the content other than "Ask Slashdot" is rebroadcast from other websites - but the original content here is the lively (and IMO worthwhile) discussions.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
Anything worth reading in the NYT or any other paper, is rewritten/syndicated/copied or covered independently by someone else who does *not* have a paywall.
Good. IMHO, the content of the NY Times is valuable and deserves to be supported. I've been looking into ways to pay for the content at the NYTimes for years. I was Times Select subscriber and was disappointed to see it go. I've tried paying for a few issues through my Nook (please excuse the gadget name drop) but I found the experience slow, difficult to navigate, and unsatisfying. I'd subscribe to the paper edition, but I really don't want to have to recycle 30lbs of paper a week. I really like the web experience and am looking forward to supporting it.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
The New York Times? What's that?
Well I'm the only one left taking the print edition, so I bet they give me free admission to the site.
If you put their stuff behind a paywall, you severely restrict the exposure of NYT star writers. That will, in turn, severely diminish their star power. There are many other good writers waiting to take their place.
Anyone hoping to maintain a stable of opinion leaders in the internet age will have to release their stuff for free. If they live behind a paywall, that's like actors that only feature in privately-screened movies. It's no way to get a robust following!
What's worse, many of these columnists will have a twitter feed and blog, so Dowd fans will still get their fill of Dowd musings in a way that does absolutely nothing for her employer. This is basically a plan to monetize NYT assets for a while, but in the long term, it guarantees a decline in the global relevance of the NYT.
If they succeed, then I'm sure others (obviously not everyone) will follow. If they don't, well they will be back to square one and have even less money time to come up with a solution.
Agreed. I didn't like the Times anyway so this is just the final nail in the coffin. I won't be even considering paying.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
It didn't work the first time and it won't work this time. The paper is a political rag now anyways. I used to love it for all of the other sections but when their "news" became a day-to-day political agenda that was it for me.
Huzzah!
Seriously though, it seems that the management's earlier lesson didn't sink in too well:
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2007/09/17/new-york-times-figures-out-the-web-its-free/
I get the "good journalism costs money" argument. However, what this shows is that while it is possible for businesses to make money off internet advertising, the Times couldn't figure out how to do it.
While I doubt we'll ever know, my guess is that their revenue from subscription will be less than that from advertising. If their top tier talent hang around, they will bleed money until they are bought by someone with deeper pockets (who will reverse this dumb-ass decision and start some serious cost cutting). If they walk, then the value of the business will shrink making them an unlikely target. My guess is the latter. The talent will walk. An "indie" Krugman/Friedman/Dowd blog could probably earn enough advertising revenue to support them. The rest will disappear.
If that happens then there will be a REAL shakeup in the old-school media franchises.
Well up to a few years ago my City's bus service was in trouble. In the past 4 years though they have completely turned the service around. In the past 4 years, every price change has been a price cut, while going from being in debt to record surpluses.
They did that by simplifying the costs, making it easier to ride eliminating transfers (Including in seat transfers when the buses traveled between different sections of the city, making it possible that you would need to "transfer" up to 2 times while never exiting the bus) and only charging per ride and passes for unlimited rides for a certain period of time.
Unprofitable routes are now now mostly paid for by businesses on those routes in exchange for having preferential bus stop placement, or having the bus even pull into the companies parking lot at peak times for people arriving and departing.
The NYT could make it easier to pay for the articles (Text a code to a number, and 25 cents is added to your phone bill) Make it so sections covered by other newspapers are free, and have the nitch articles be paid, have all you can learn plans, offer early access to articles to companies in fields the company reports on at a premium subscription rate.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
Your readership is flat.
Temporary increase in profit at the expense or relevancy. I vaguely remember a radio talk show host. Howard something. He was very popular at one point but moved to XM radio for more money. I wonder what ever happened to him.
Hopefully this will finish off this propaganda source. Hopefully FoxNews and the rest of the corporate media will follow their lead.
I know newspapers have to make a living, and I don't care if that comes out of my pocket. But they seem to be unable to come up with a payment model I can live with.
I access a lot of news sites. No way I can pay a subscription to all them, or even to all my favorites. There has to be some way I can access all those different sources without breaking the bank. But newspapers can't seem to find it. Micropayments seem to be an obvious solution that never goes anywhere. (Yes, I know all the objections. I'd take them more seriously if anybody actually tried it.) This notion of "metered" access sounds doable — if they can keep my recurring costs at a reasonable level.
Of course, they main reason newspapers are so anxious to monetize their web editions: the print editions are losing money hand over fist. Most newspapers have responded by cutting costs. But that means fewer pages, more fluff, less solid journalism. This drives away subscribers, and before you know it they're in a death spiral.
I recently heard an interesting interview with Jim Maroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News. He's taken quite a different approach:
We have continued to protect as much of our scale of journalists and journalistic resources in this market, adding pages to the paper instead of taking them out. One of the things that we have done is we have gone to our customers and said, look, we need to ask you to pay a greater proportion of the cost of publishing and distributing a newspaper to your home. In so doing, we've reduced our dependency on advertising.
The typical model for newspapers has been 80 percent advertising and 20 percent revenue from the people who buy the paper. By this time next year, we'll be something closer to 60/40, maybe even 55/45. To date, we're about 80 percent through all of our renewals, and 92 percent of our subscribers have agreed to pay a higher price, and I'm very proud of that. And I don't think we could have done it had we continued to cut our newsroom or continued to cut pages out of the paper.
End result: the paper is debt-free and profitable.
One wonders why more papers haven't gone this route. The answer I come up with is that most of them are controlled by big corporations, which are run by bean counters who know everything about "controlling costs" and nothing about actually providing something of value.
I was just going to post the blurb down below on the "New York Magazine" Website.
But somehow they required a registration, which somehow didn't work immediately, so I just didn't bother to figure it out, but pasted it here.
And yes, I lost my slashdot User-Id, or rather the password, about ten years ago, and never bothered to get a new one.
So, case in point, that's why I believe it won't work out for the NYT - laziness will do them in!
-----
For more than 20 years now, I buy the same newspaper virtually every day at the newsstand, even though about 50% of the time these days, I throw it away unread in the evening. However, I never thought about getting a subscription, because I don't like the idea of not being able to stop buying it the next day if I do not like what I read today.
I guess I'm just not a subscription guy - and it is not about the money. Even though I have been reading the NYT-online for about 10 years, I will probably stop doing so if getting at interesting content gets annoying.
Obviously, it is only fair that the NYT charges for its content - but I guess I won't be among the customers. To me, it is probably not worth the hassle to get out the credit card, type in a number, and then risk forgetting to put back my wallet in my pocket, like I once did. Other publications like WSJ, FT have been going the same route for parts of their articles, but last time I went there is months ago. I guess there is a psychological reason to this - people don't like to be subtly hinted at the fact they are freeloading. I do donate about the amount of a yearly newspaper subscription to wikipedia, but in this case, despite the Jimmy Wales blurb on top of the main page, they have succeeded to give me the impression that every reader is welcome, if he donates or not.
That is why I believe the NYT will fail in the long term with this scheme. Of course, for the staff, which has families to support, failing in the long term is much better than failing in the short term, and therefore, I wish them good luck - but I am convinced it will not take long until either a Google or a Wikipedia of newspapers emerges to make people forget the NYT in an Encyclopedia Britannica way.
A while back, there was a video called EPIC (which has been updated -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQDBhg60UNI ) which talked about the end of NYT online... I wonder if this is the beginning?
By by New York Times, you'll be missed dearly.....For about 5 minutes....
notice that the launch date is january 27... same day as the rumored apple tablet unveiling.
Newspapers are losing money. They're trying to figure out how to get "this Internet thing" to work for them. I know a lot of you have ideas and think that they're good but, to be honest, I doubt most of us here knows the intricacies of newspapers. It's their trade and their business. Let them try and figure it out how to make it work. That's what capitalism is all about after all. Good ideas live and bad ideas die off. Their current business model is apparently not working. Something has to change. If it works, then good for them. If you don't like it, don't pay for it. Not everything that has a price is bad. Until they go around suing people for inflated sums of money, I have no objections to what they're doing.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Watch me never read the nytimes again. I mean it's a pretty good paper but honestly, do you think we can't get the same crap else where? Not to mention the non-stop anti-chinese hysteria they print is getting really annoying. We are all adults, trying to scare us about the "wicked chinamen" is kind of insulting really. Unfortunately most other American papers are written around the 8th grade level so it's a bit light. But there's always BBC and the London papers.
I don't get it... I never believed that Google's ad model worked, but their stock price says differently. So the ad model works for Google and all other news providers online... but not for the nyt or wsj? What is the obsession in charging the end user? Just pass the cost to the advertisers.
The Admin and the Engineer
And I don't mean my title to sound flippant. It's just that I stopped reading the NYT years ago and don't really miss any of their content. There are plenty of other online news sources where I can get my news. Not to mention that their articles are verbose and have a decidedly liberal bent. Even as a liberal, I don't always appreciate that.
If they don't want to offer ad-supported online news, they should stick to their printed newspaper. They do that well. Charging for online content isn't going to work for them in the long run and the debate over how to deal with it is just going to consume them and detract from them being the best news source they can be.
And another thought, maybe they aren't as epic as they think they are. CNN and BBC are able to provide free content. I know they are larger news companies that provide multiple media outputs. But it seems to be working for them...
- Fletch uncovers a plot to shutdown his plans to go on holidays and decides to investigate leading him to find a more sinister plot to shutdown his employer!
If the times diversified into the movie business, I think there will be more money to be had... They'll just have to wait until Fletch Won first.
Every small town has a newspaper. Most larger ones have several.
This is simply not true.
The Courier Express folded in 1982.
The Buffalo News [owned by Warren Buffet] has been the only daily newspaper worth a damn in Western New York for twenty-eight years.
The one newspaper city has become the norm. The major city without a daily newspaper is a very close at hand.
> Actually, I think it says in general, the public are cheapskates AND the NYT has a non-viable business model.
I think this is a good point!
In germany, where I'm from, there are basically two large relevant quality print newspapers (www.sueddeutsche.de and www.faz.net) you might compare with the NYT. They both have a print circulation of about 400K, slightly bigger than the NYT (1,2M ???) when adjusted for the population of germany (80M) vs. US (300M).
They compete fiercely for the market, and their online Issues are both free.
There is only one local newspaper in the area where I live (print circulation about 200k) and they charge for the online issue, unless you subscribe to the print edition - i think, because I never bothered to find out. The local newspaper seems to have been doing well, it is financially sound.
The two big national newspaper had to cut back on expenses twice - once after the economic and merger boom around 2000 collapsed, and a second time during the current crisis, because corporate advertising and nationwide job listings collapsed. For them, I believe, it is a game of chicken - the first to blink and charge for access will probably lose the part of its reader base which is not ideologically fixed on one paper - though by american standards, both are quite centrist.
And if they somehow decide to switch to simultaneously charge for content, they will lose the majority of their readers to the online issue of "Der Spiegel" ( www.spiegel.de/international), whose print edition is a weekly magazine in a format like Time Magazine, but a far as investigative journalism is concerned, is more like the NYT or Washington Post.
So, i think that even in a relatively small market like german language newspapers, there will always be an alternative left for people who do not want or cannot pay for a decent news service.
Since the potential reader base for a national online newspaper is so big, there will always be enough advertising dollars around to support at least one publication. If others go pay the route, they might survive for a while, but they are eventually doomed unless they can carve out a small niche to survive in.
...I'll just go somewhere else where the news is free"...
News has always been free, especially for big events such as what happened in Haiti. What has been harder to come by is interesting, worthwhile local news. You know, to find out what friends and neighbors are up to? That is the reason we still subscribe to a paper edition of our hometown newspaper. Getting the special ads for local supermarkets is quite useful at times as well. There are also usually coupons for even bigger savings.
I have never, even once, surfed to a big-city newspaper site other than through Google. If the NYT can no longer be accessed this way for free, they will lose a large number of readers. There will always be free access to big important news events. There will also always be plenty of commentary on news and current events, more than I have time to read anyway.
All theory is gray
Sorry, I'm never going to pay for news. I find the fact that newspapers sell advertising all over the paper, toss in a few articles, AND then charge me for the paper to be especially distasteful. I can't remember the last time I've bought a newspaper, and don't subscribe because it's all ads... I want news - not ads.
As for the online - you have LESS costs than with the paper route. No transportation, no printing, no union machinists, etc... You can have a smaller building, or hell - NO building - let your reporters work from their own houses (or *gasp* on the street where the stories are).
So you need LESS money to operate - just figure out how to do it. Yes, you'll make less money. Oh well. At least you're still doing it. And you can have special issues or stories that are sponsored by XYZ company and make some additional revenue that way.
But me pay for news? Nope. Sorry, never gonna happen. Someone, somewhere is going to reprint it - and everyone else will get for free what us few suckers paid for. I refuse to be a sucker.
If that mans the NYT goes under - then good riddance. They've been a PITA ever since trying to enforce that asinine sign up to see the story scheme.... Haven't read their tripe since the inception of that...
Well , their suicide sets a good example for a dated corrupt media. A good idea defended by the founding fathers and others was reduced to a shallow meaningless lie of propaganda for government, liberal causes and big business. What doesn't evolve as necessary, dies as superfluous tripe. It won't be missed.
Now to take down the major networks.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I like the times. I want them to continue publishing. I won't miss them, because I'll pay to read it.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
People have developed this odd belief that anything you see on the internet only took an upload to produce. News has a cost and if papers can't make money, they're going to stop doing it.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
anyone remember why we did this free news thing to begin with??
I have been hearing about how wonderful everything will be when web advertising matures. How it will manage to pay for everything on the web and all us all of have whatever we want without paying for it. Of course, we're just in the early stages of that yet, so it will take some more time. But we are right at the brink and it will be just a little while longer...
Yes, we have all been hearing this for a long long time. It hasn't happened yet. It is extremely unlikely to ever happen. Anyone that waits for it is simply being foolish.
Here is my best guess:
1: Paywall goes up.
2: Pageviews and visit stats drop like a rock.
3. [weeks/months later] Consumers realize that the NYTimes content is in fact higher quality than what they can access for free elsewhere.
4. Some percent of their pre-paywall consumers purchase online subscriptions.
5. Profit!
The problem is that there the "research" is not being done in the first place.
That's why all those paper re-print the same material as every other paper.
The Daily Show is the last honest news organization and they have to sell themselves on comedy.
When was the last time that you saw the NYT do a comparison between a politician's current statements and his previous statements?
Excerpt:
with all sorts of expenses
why couldn't the existing columnists at the nyt just pull a nikke finke?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikki_Finke
what do they lose? they may make more money via online advertising than their current salaries. and if they don't, who cares? the life style is: a laptop. thats it. that's your expense for reaching the same audience you did with the new york times
all of the old big media organizations are just going to be dissolved anad atomized by the web. news and reproting will still continue, but your relationships will be with individual trusted reporters, not organizations. its a superior model
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Oh well, I just won't bother reading it then. I will read www.bbc.co.uk or www.telegraph.co.uk or theregister.co.uk or www.zeit.de or cnn.com or slashdot.org or www.dailymail.co.uk or and the list goes on.
If the NYT and WSJ can go and stay non-free, it will be a matter of time before the BBC and the Telegraph and the Register and CNN go non-free as well. Eventually, everyone will have a news site they subscribe too, and probably what will happen is that there will be a micro-payments service between the media that lets you have a single point of subscription.
I mean, its pretty simple. If you are a good writer, you can either work for free, or work for a site that can charge people and survive. Which do you choose. Eventually, the non-free guys will win out.
This is my sig.
1. Something is unprofitable (or is made to seem unprofitable for ideological "the government shouldn't own $FOO" reasons).
2. Sell it cheaply and rent it back at a yearly cost close to what it was sold for (or we simply get rid of it completely if it's minor enough and no politician stands to gain anything from the sale).
Unfortunately, for this right winger, that is exactly what the right wing politicians do in the USA. My beloved Republican Parties rode into power in 1994 promising reduced government and balanced budgets and I would have thought with Bush in 2000 we could have cut the gov't a lot, but instead, defense budgets skyrocketed largely because the Republicans got rid of government jobs and doled them out to subcontractors. And, in fact, with some education, you can see that they have been doing this for the last 50 years, which is why the US Navy doesn't make its own ships any more and even the Army doesn't make rifles.
Honestly, if you are ideological, you can't vote for any particular party, and have to pick the candidate and cause.
This is my sig.
That's funny: all I've ever seen conservatives do here in the US is this:
- sell the route to a "private" contractor who happens to be a major donor.
- when the route still doesn't make money, subsidize it.
- when that doesn't work, blame the Democrats and "those people" and claim that it's proof government doesn't work - thus validating all of Ayn Rand's theories, except for the nasty atheist bits.
"Praise Jeebus" is in there someplace, pretty much at every step. The underage boys, diapers and wetsuits are omitted in the interest of clarity.
I am also interested in seeing the results of this experiment. Unfortunately, I won't be able to participate as I already pay to much for the Sun and Enquirer. Now that's news worth the money.
Push advertising has been severely weakened by both search engines and search advertising. Increasing intrusiveness has also added to advertising's death spiral.
I'd suggest (1), charge for material in the most a la carte way (e.g. micropayments for individual articles, plus discounted subscriptions to particular sections or columnists), and (2), up-front or deferred charges for helping people choose the right product.
When the next generation of financial types start trading eg 20 somethings they will not be buying the Wallstreet Journal and it will collapse.
I disagree completely. The Wall Street Journal has been available online to print subscribers and in a digital only subscription for some time now. The subscription includes feeds, videos, and access to the archives. Will the printed version be retired eventually? Perhaps, but I don't see that happening any time soon. In any case, the WSJ has shown that it can deliver content how and where people want on the device of their choice and that is not going away because the value is in the content and, as others have already said, the content on WSJ is worth the price. The WSJ has been successful in charging for online access whereas the New York Times has not; put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Well , their suicide sets a good example for a dated corrupt media. A good idea defended by the founding fathers and others was reduced to a shallow meaningless lie of propaganda for government, liberal causes and big business. What doesn't evolve as necessary, dies as superfluous tripe. It won't be missed.
It won't die. It's too important to the ubiquitous propaganda effort required to keep Objective Reality subdued down to a mere nagging thought at the back of everybody's mind. My guess is that this NYT thing is a ploy which fits somehow into the whole internet crackdown which has been brewing in the wings. (The Obama White House, being just one player, is preparing some pretty crazy legislation to be unleashed on the world stage.)
Somewhat more real news comes from places like http://www.democracynow.org/ --Which while it doesn't touch certain things, is a helluva lot less doped up than the NYT.
-FL
Paywall, paywall, thy name is blackout. Put up a barrier to your news, even in the name of "we want money" and I will go somewhere else for that news. Sure the spin might not be as pretty, but the content is still there. There are 10,000 places on the net to get news. The BBC offers RSS feeds of all the big stories, as do 10,000 other sites on the net. Oh, I will miss the fine prose of the NYT, but other journalists have pretty good prose too, and if I really want more prose, I will read celebrated authors.
When was the last time you read an article that included a direct quote?
About a minute ago, when I RTFA. Ok, fine, I didn't read it. But I did skim it over just to spite you.
I also quit reading anything from the NY Times because of their silly "you must register" tactics. Everything they have is available in many other places, free of charge and without having me sign up to get it.
I hope they choke on this, it would serve them right!
Didn't they try this a few years ago and it failed miserably so they made their online content free again with a log-in?
That still doesn't beat the idiocy of one former Australian state government. They sold the government-owned monopoly bookmaker to another state government for less than the annual profit it made. Whilst the state was in a financial crisis at the time, the price was ludicrously low.
So what city are you from? I'm interested in studying the case of your city for my area.
John in Medford, Oregon (not so anonymous anymore)
Open Source killed my software revenues (consulting)
Open source products actually make consulting easier for most people -- there are products the customer / consultant have actually heard of, and they can be implemented much sooner than a custom solution could be scoped, coded, tested and deployed. Now if you're doing old-school custom software what's killing you isn't necessarily open source, it's the internet. Having customers able to easily locate, choose, and download an application that meets their needs makes the idea of software customization -- in a lot of situations -- obsolete.
That said, I've been programming for a very long time. I saw the change coming and embraced it. If that's not your thing then so be it, but you should know the reasons and they are not "open source". It's not some dark voodoo, it's instant gratification, available for everyone. Blame the internet, blame competition, but many people are making money with Open Source software and I'm one of them.
If a car analogy helps you, it's like the local car dealer keeping the local prices high for years because there weren't any other choices around, and boom! CarMax moves into the next town. Local people now have choice. Why would they want to use the local car dealer? If you can't answer that, then you (as the local car dealer) will be forced into another career choice. You must provide added value that the customer will not only understand, but will pay for. CarMax isn't the problem, it's that you are still running on an antiquated business model that provides no value proposition for the consumer. CarMax just provided the catalyst for your customers to understand they are no longer without options. Blaming CarMax only shows you don't understand the problem.
I dont do this often, but this comment is spot on and needs to be modded up - and I seem to lack any mod points!
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Allow subscribers to post comments to each article and advertisement, but everyone else who don't subscribe suffer with the fact that they cannot reply/correct comments that are in error or silly. Also subscribers have an option of turning off comments and advertising. Also those that want certain advertising and are subscribers the ability to pick only that type of advertising. Just ideas rambling in a very old mind.
the only guy i read there is roger cohen, and you're right, he seems to be in some other country every day. his columns while in iran were incredible
the latest on google and china is good too
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opinion/15iht-edcohen.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And that was that. What news' next, /.?
The YouTube for this article is here.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Same here. Dropped the WSJ app at the start of the year and replaced it with bloomberg & reuters - both free.
"It's a doughnut stuffed with M&M's. That way when you finish the doughnut, you don't have to eat any M&M's."
See subject-line above: It's one of the BIGGEST PROBLEMS there is worldwide.
I haven't purchased an edition of the New York Times for at least 25 years. I won't be buying their online content either.
No problem here to solve.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Right now the NYT's pricing model is really strange. The website is available freely (with ads not much worse than when I dropped my subscription to the WSJ years ago). The iphone app is free, and I've heard it's pretty good. The Kindle version isn't complete and is $14/mo (it was supposed to drop to $10/mo for DX users, but that hasn't happened yet). Until just a few days ago, the nook price was an unbelievable $25/mo (now matched $14/mo). Sure, you pay for the convenience of it delivered to you "free" via the cell networks, but the iphone/ipod touch vs. Kindle pricing is really strange.
The WSJ is also strange. Online only is $2/week, print is $2.30/week, and both is $2.70/week. The online-only price seems pretty expensive relative to the cost of delivering a copy to me 6 days a week. Are print ads just that much more lucrative than online ads? I quit my subscription years back because I was tired of paying ~$100/yr for content with just as much ads as the NYT where the news was always free. The Kindle version is $15/mo - more expensive than the online and print subscription!
It's too bad TFA indicates the NYTimes is probably not going with the metered approach of X free articles before being asked to subscribe. Outside linking seems crucial to keeping your market share, and I've seen a small fraction of WSJ links compared to NYTimes links over the years. Offering a small number of ad-supported articles before needing to subscribe guarantees that the casual reader will still be able to get content and perhaps view relatively more ads, while more regular readers (and the hope that casual readers decide to become regular readers) subscribe and get unrestricted access. Bonus points for offering some amenities - reduced ads (how about text only? That'd be awesome). A substantial discount on ebook versions would be nice too. $14/mo is too high, especially for ebook versions which can't display all content due to the eink tech as it stands.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Nytimes.com may succeed, but as a wsj.com subscriber myself, somewhat disappointed with an increasingly noisy site and "front-page" opinion content a-la News corp, I may have to switch.
This is probably the longest circumlocution that I've ever seen for a much simpler phrase: "Death throes." Nice job though, Times. Can't remember the last time I cared that an article came from the New York Times as opposed to some other paper. Bye.
Liberty in your lifetime
network tv would kill for those ratings. tfa states unique nyt readers in the 20,000,000 range. doesn't say but avg dailies? those numbers are similar to some of the most expensive and profitable scripted broadcast programs now airing like ncis. they're greater than the simpsons, higher than two and half men, more than desperate houswives, all weekly programs, all wildly successful. it's more than double the highest rated evening news franchise. it would be like owning a top five network tv show for every single day of the year. that and they still have the paper with it's printed ads and paid for circulation. they're smart guys. strange they can't package those global eyeballs profitably.
Good journalism co$t$ money? Fat cat useless executives co$t WAY TOO MUCH MONEY is more like it. Would anyone like to bet against me when I say I severely doubt that their pay was not cut whatsoever & that actual useful production staff got cut or outsourced instead to "save money"? Who's money is "saved" there?? That of the useless executives is whose "money was saved", and that is about it. They're hilarious. I mean, do they think that "they're the only game in town"? Beg to differ: They have PLENTY of competition who will gain by their "genius move" here is all, & that's typical of their "intelligence" in these matters (look at the results of their "fine business leadership" in the USA for the past decade now for instance).
Sounds like they've got a deal with Apple in the works, and they don't want to give away the content that tablet users are going to be paying for.
It may not be that bad a deal...
This isn't Flamebait. We're talking about why media is failing these days, and this is absolutely relevant.
Currently Fox news is #1 and this is what they're serving up for the public. It's unethical, misleading, and just plain flat-out wrong. And currently (if the numbers mean anything) this is what the public actually wants.
This should scare the absolute crap out of you.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I dont know how I lived without subscribing to RSS feeds in Firefox. Atop my screen, I have the local newspaper (they only put up 5 or so headlines a day though! lame!), a few blogs, the local tv news channel, slashdot, The Onion, Cult Of Mac, Engadget, Kotaku, Gizmodo, Roughly Drafted, Channel Dvorak, Fake Steve Jobs....
And all of these update automatically, a single click, with command held down to open in a new tab, and BOOM. It just works!(tm Apple)
Remind me again why I should PAY for news? And then to find that a full HALF the newspaper is ads, and the OTHER half is all Associated Press, or news written by another newspaper under the conglomerate.
At first I was let down with the current set of rumours that the Apple tablet would only be a ebook reader....but, if they pull off subscribing to RSS feeds and the browser etc...perhaps with ways to purchase online content, it could truly be the death of physical media. Even if this rumoured tablet doesnt take over the market, it legitimises the market for "digital content".
---
I love the NYT and the WSJ. Every day I find articles there that I wasn't looking for but which greatly educate and inform me. I read the NYT online, and I got a free 39 week print subscription to the WSJ.
I hate paid subscription models for online comment.
So, when NYT raises the pay wall, I'll certainly try to get along without it. I can't say how long I'll last. It will be a waiting game. Who gives in first, the NYT or us?
I actually enjoy purchasing music through iTunes, when you have such a low price point ($1.79-2.39 NZD) per song, why bother finding torrents and having the police knock down your door?
I also love buying iPhone apps, I would never consider stealing the dollar or two that the average App costs.
Recently, the thing thats screwed me over is Audiobooks, they are near impossible to get here? Audible lets me have an account, but books I wanted, even very well known ones like A Clockwork Orange, are "unavailable in your geographic location"......If I'm signed out, I can see the book, if I'm signed it, it wont show at all in search results, it knows "oh, he lives THERE? I wont let him have it then".
The internet should be international, my credit card is as good as yours (unless you have a "Black Card")
---
If you want to hold your own on slashdot:
How is this not journalism?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
No, there doesn't have to be a happy medium. There really really doesn't. When it's time to go on the cart, you go on the cart. There is no middle ground between alive and dead. When it's time for carriage makers and buggy whip manufacturers to shuffle off this mortal coil, to vanish into the (history of) pages of wikihistory, then it's time. There's no way you can wish some alternative course into being, any more than you can pray a dead relative back to life.
They had their day in the sun, and now it's done. Their day is over and there is nothing they can do about it. The best they can hope for is to shuffle off the stage with grace before they fall over, embarrassing both themselves and their audience.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There is a market for a paper free newspaper (oh the irony).
With the advent of e-readers, net books and smartphones there is a significant market for a new kind of newspaper.
Are you good journalist, book authors or columnist? Why work then for a traditional paper news media?
Create your own online news system, a blog may even suffice. You will be in total control or your own news. Get rid of all the overheard of a brick and mortar newspaper.
If the content is good, ad revenues will flood in. No need to compromise your ethics because you will control which advertisement gets in, and also a leaner cost structure make easier to reject crap and bad influences
. Need a printed edition? Just make your article frees to any paper-newspaper (local, national or international) who want to print them. Just request them to provide the reference to you.
This is the real danger for classic newspaper, and their outmoded business model and cost structure. Let them die a slow death.
It will require that extremely overpaid newspaper 'talent' take the same kind of pay cuts forced on other workers wishing to save their industries. If the people who worked in these high profile reporting jobs were doing their business properly we wouldn't have been lied into war with Iraq over bogus WMD and 9-11 connection claims. Just look at all the in depth reporting they didn't do on Bernie Madoff over the last decade. A man supposedly buying and selling billions in stocks, but in retrospect we find out he never ever made a trade? How hard is that to figure out for chrissakes?? Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
I'm obviously getting into the comments very late, but I felt the need to reply.
If you plan on replacing your nytimes.com reading with BBC News, you obviously have never read both of them. They are nothing alike. Whereas the BBC mainly reports strictly news (with an arguable anti-US spin that has grown tiresome to me), the NYTimes produces fantastic journalism. They have the best columnists and investigative reporters anywhere. Their travel and food sections are second to none. I also enjoy the tone of their writing -- it carries a more traditional, formal language than many newspapers these days.
I will watch with great interest how this plays out. I love my nytimes.com and would have to think hard about whether to pay for it.
Businesses subsidising the bus service? Now that's innovative, I hope they do an in-depth case study on your city's bus service and publish it online.
...NYT announce paywalls, Murdoch and News International announce paywalls - and everyone thinks they'r eshooting themselves in the foot.
These are not stupid companies. Well, not *that* stupid, anyway.
What if this coincides with the Apple Tablet bringing micropayment for enhanced content? An app store for print media, in essence.
that's a good new for all news paper company. Now every one going to start charge...in 2 to 3 years
If they are looking to maximise short term profits over long-term gains. My guess is that the owners are looking to sell the paper come this summer/autumn or they are taking a massive long-term gamble that I fear will not pay off.
The solution is a paywall you can climb over with a little effort: a pay model that you can circumvent with a little research and time/effort. Then, you can retain everyone who's too price sensitive to pay; that means they don't flock to your competition. Meanwhile, the people who have money for it are not going to waste their valuable time (since their time IS money) circumventing the paywall, it's cheaper for them to just pay. Finally, despite being a pay site, they can retain some advertising, and if 10 million people are jumping the pay fence, that's ten million more eyeballs; granted, it's the poorest ones, but you can still sell them nachos and light beer.
"The NY Times is not left-wing. The Guardian is left-wing. Unless you're using the American definition of 'left' which is basically anyone who objects to bringing back the workhouses."
Yes, US conservatives are surely fighting hard to "bring back the workhouses". Care to mention any?
"In any given election, 99% of Americans vote for candidates who support large government spending on social projects, so I'm not sure how right-wing the population really is."
Ever heard of quantitative thinking? You should try it some time.
"Bear in mind the teabaggers are a very small group of Fox News astroturfers who had no problems with big government when a white president was giving blank cheques to the military."
Indeed - conservative support for the military is surely conditioned on the president being white.
On a side note, I've been thinking - now that you classy libs have moved political discourse a step forward by bringing sexual slurs to straight 'news' reporting with the teabag explosion, how should Fox et al keep the populist edge?
I say Liberals should henceforth be known as "buttfuckers". Further expansion is possible of course: "Liberal buttfuckers took it up the ass yesterday in Mass...", etc. etc.
In the gold rush, the people who made money weren't the prospectors but the people who sold the prospectors shovels.
Why do I write out a $100+ check to Comcast every month, but if boston.com starts to charge $1 a month, I'm going to tell them to get bent? Comcast is just a pipe, but I need the pipe.
What if boston.com was the pipe and the content? Home delivery of the Globe is about $45 a month. What if the Globe started their own ISP, wired or wireless, and undercut Comcast? $25 a month for high-speed internet, and boston.com is the home page for free?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If the big newspapers don't start charging at the same time, the last one wins.
When the Times starts charging, why wouldn't anyone jump over to the BBC or the Washington Post for the couple of stories they're interested in?
I recently saw an in-depth look at the prospects for the new business written by a former newsman that talks about these issues. It's worth a look: http://www.barryschiffman.com/thelastround/articles/newsfuture.html
at $1/yr we can stay in business!!!
Oh... less than 20,000 will pay to read our crap?
I guess we'll have to start charging $1000/yr!
Back when Times Select existed, I thought about joining. I like the NY Times because it really is a well-written news source. I don't like getting news from TV or print newspapers. I listen to NPR when I can, but I prefer to be able to scan through the NYT especially on the iPhone app.
I'm waiting to see what this pay model will be. I really wish Google would buy the NYT and put in a good ad-based revenue system, but that seems unlikely. If the pay model is fair and cheap, then I might do it. If it's not, then I'll search for better sources. I have NPR.org (and I pay for that by maintaining a membership with my local NPR station--because it's a fair system). But I'll be looking for other sources.
I'll scan through the rest of the comments for other free sources (or sources to which I can donate what I think they are worth) for good journalism.
I really thought the NYT was onto something when they released their content for free. I thought they had a plan. It seems like they didn't have much of a plan at all. Oh well.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
The NYT gets a lot of its news from the AP and Reuters, both non profit, these sites will continue to be free, and they are the source for most newspapers around the USA.
Where I went to university for undergrad, the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, there was something similar. From what I've seen, a lot of universities are doing this these days: certain (or all, in some cases) city bus routes are free if you have a student ID card. It's definitely paid for by the university, and there are special university routes. At Rochester, there were routes between the two major universities (UR and RIT) and local shopping areas, with stops right in front of the mall, the most popular grocery store (Wegman's), Wal-Mart, etc., as well as one to some downtown destinations.
I have seen non-university-route buses at those stops as well, so whether or not the businesses are subsidizing anything, the bus service has figured out how to make it work and presumably does not run up the city's debt paying for it. Of course, usually the only students who use the bus service are freshman (at least at UR), because freshman can't get parking permits.
I don't know where the previous guy lives, but in my experience whether or not bus service works profitably depends on how dense the city is and where businesses and services are located in relation to where people live. Think of places like NYC and Chicago, which have very usable buses. It can also be a small city, though - cities like Rochester, or small towns. Buses simply do not work in the sprawl - see Southern California, where I live now. I pity those who have to use the buses here. I tried it one time when I was just visiting without a car and it's ridiculously bad. It doesn't have to be that big of a sprawl, though - for example, Buffalo, NY has usable buses and one light rail line downtown, but most of the population of the area lives outside of the city, and though the suburbs are a fraction of the size of SoCal, the bus system is almost as unusable no matter if your destination is within the suburbs or if you're trying to get downtown and back.
He obviously isn't saying that every thing they print is untrue. He's correctly pointing out that the NY Times editorializes on every page, and prints ridiculously biased stories that push their political agenda. Those who agree with that political agenda think that the paper is the penultimate in journalism, since it's an echo chamber for their worldview. In fact, having done so many times, I can spot someone of the liberal persuasion by their fastidious reading of the Times. Talking with them for 10 minutes will confirm it.
There are those who read the occasional story, and that gives no guidance. But those who are always toting a copy or have the site as their home page are 99% liberal.
Disclaimer: I get most of my news from BBC, though they are heavily biased as well. Knowing the bias helps to nullify it, I just get more info more quickly from BBC News. However, what they *choose* to report on creates a bias that is not so easily nullified. Take for example the lack of balanced coverage on CRU.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
I'm very interested in learning more about this too. Which city is it? Is there someplace where I can learn more?
The NYT could make it easier to pay for the articles (Text a code to a number, and 25 cents is added to your phone bill)
I don't have international texting as part of my cell phone plan, you insensitive clod!
While I understand why they would need to do it, this would be disappointing.
I also suspect that it will not bring in quite enough money to support their current collection of content. Perhaps what they might consider first scaling back their content production as a way to cut costs...
Whoever Has the Most Toys Wins!
I'd trade 500 bloggers for 5 Times columnists any day of the week.
If you keep your 5 Times columnists, can I have 500 insightful /. commentators?
I've learned more about politics, history, law and economics and a few other topics from reading slashdot than from three years of high school* history classes and all the news paper reading I've ever done.
(* where high school refers to the Danish three-year secondary education (stx))
And although I love being among my fellow {technology, gaming, role playing, science fiction, etc.} geeks, for the sole benefit of them being educative you can keep your Times columnists to yourself if I can have 500 insightful /. commentators.
[I love you guys :)]
Why would you be OK with Slashdot charging when as you said it's the users who make it worthwhile?
I don't think they should charge for an online subscription, because it will discourage people from reading the news. In times like these, people need to know the news so they can better prepare for the End Times. See: http://endtime.com/
It never ceases to amaze me how people who expect their own work to be valued and remunerated balk at compensating, or even acknowledging the value of, that of others.
The ability of the BBC to provide "free" content is based in part, if not wholly, on a subsidy from the British government. A free press is essential to a strong democracy; and, the British have taken action to ensure that regardless of the vagaries of the economy, or the whims of advertisers, their stream of objective journalism will remain unimpeded. If fact, to add to a long list of our dubious distinctions, America is one of the few Western democracies that don't provide a substantial subsidy to the press -- as detailed in "How to Save Journalism"
For the most part, it's the work of reporters at newspapers that generates the news:
And, with the loss of other sources of revenue, advertising alone simply isn't sufficient to sustain that endeavor.
And there is much rejoicing that such a biased rag is going dark.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I was referring to the Rochester bus system. The bus company is RTS. www.rgrta.com
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
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