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."
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.
Name an important piece of investigative journalism done by the Times in the last ten years. I can't. And I'm a regular reader. It's increasingly a "lifestyle" paper. It sees its crucial missions as propping up the real estate market in NYC (with fascinating articles like the one suggesting that since banks aren't lending, maybe you young people can borrow the half-million for a starter apartment from your folks), and pretending to be liberal while propping up most of the neocon fantasies about an American new world order (even before cheerleading Iraq, it was responsible for the absurd Whitewater charges).
I like half their editorial columnists. They have a couple of good economic writers. And I'm entertained by the lifestyle and real estate fluff. Plus at least their front page is by their own writers rather than the AP - which continues a rapid descent in quality too. And some of their NYC coverage is unavailable elsewhere - although only of interest to people with lives or roots in the city.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
FiveThirtyEight provides fantastic political coverage, largely based upon statistical analyses. Although the site became a bit more editorialized after the 2008 election, Nate Silver acknowledges his biases up front, and almost always provides rock-solid data to back them up. He's also been responsible for bringing down a few fraudulent pollsters.
Speaking of political commentary, Andrew Sullivan is certainly an interesting beast. His tangents about Sarah Palin are a bit silly, although his general political commentary tends to be spot-on.
Bad Astronomy is an all-around fantastic science blog.
Jason Kottke's blog has very little original content, although his content selections are impeccable, reminding me of what Slashdot used to be. He's good at his job in the same way that NPR is good at what it does.
There are more excellent music blogs than I can even possibly begin to enumerate. These have helped launch a mini revolution in the music industry. Although mainstream pop is still the same recycled garbage as it always was, the alternative music community is thriving, and occasionally some of the good stuff does trickle up into the mainstream.
BLDGBLOG is a great read for armchair architects. Infrastructurist is a great read for armchair civil engineers.
FlowingData is a fascinating read about data visualization.
Want to look good at work? Read this.
I'm sure I'm forgetting a few good ones. Google solicited the reading lists of a few experts. Their recommendations are generally quite good.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
CRU being hacked and proven to provide false data, never reported by NYT.
Because the stolen e-mails proved no such thing. But since you request: Hacked E-Mail Data Prompts Calls for Changes in Climate Research
Rush Limbaugh being misquoted and slandered, never reported by NYT.
Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. His opinions are not news. Similarly, if I call Rush a doodie-head that's not news, and if some other media organization misquotes Rush it's not news. But since you asked, here is the New York Times topic page for Rush Limbaugh. Find me where he was misquoted and slandered by the Times and you may be onto something.
The list is COUNTLESS
You've almost counted to one so far. You're doing well, don't stop now.
you just don't know about it because you are too ignorant to look up more than one source of news
Based on your own preferred source of news entertainment, I'd reckon the list of my sources of news would be beyond your comprehension.
Breakfast served all day!