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."

Comments

sayonara nyt

[JackSpratts]

i'll miss you. then again, i'll have a lot more free time.

Bad decision

[lyinhart]

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.

First

[JustOK]

First they came for the free news sites and I said nothing.

existential question

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Re:How to do this right?

[Anonymous Coward]

so, what newspaper do you work for?