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.
I dont know the details but does any one else have a macabre interest in whats going to happen to the NY times.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have you been reading the WSJ recently? It is full of sensationalized articles that seem clearly intended to push a political agenda. Case in point was their recent article entitled something about how our military drones were 'hacked' by terrorists, a statement which was directly contradicted in the article body. There have been quite a few such articles in the recent past a fact that has caused some die hard WSJ fans I know to reconsider their subscription. Unfortunately you are correct in that they ALSO publish invaluable business news which is what their readers are paying for. However your assertion that the WSJ is somehow about the standard of other new papers in terms of 'op-ed rants being passed off as news' you are sorely mistaken.
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.
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.
As a financial analyst, I call bullshit on that. Serious investors don't rely on the WSJ alone, exactly because it is full of brainless neocon op-eds, and gratuituos deliberate political spin even in its news articles. Anybody with a brain wouldn't rely on it for political/economic coverage, even if it often gets some basic company news right (though even there it doesn't hurt to double-check with the FT, or Bloomberg News, or the Economist or some other more reputable paper).
Many (but definitely not all) big-name columnists' opinions are in fact "better" than almost everyone in the blogosphere, for a few key reasons:
I'd trade 500 bloggers for 5 Times columnists any day of the week.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
These days, I get all my news from either FARK, Slashdot, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or The Colbert Report.
No you don't.
You are getting your news second, third or fourth hand.
Filtered and packaged by whatever passes for an editor at these sites. The Reader's Digest version.
The same thing happened with the Wall Street Journal, too -- they're not even on my radar anymore (Thanks, Rupert!)
A celebration of ignorance does not inspire confidence.
The WSJ is on your CEO's radar. His customers and clients. His financial backers. His home-town banker.
You need to know what they are thinking.
The Journal has the largest circulation of any newspaper in the United States. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the paper has a circulation of 2.1 million copies (including 400,000 paid, online subscriptions) as of October 2009 compared to USA Today's 1.9 million. Its main rival in the Business newspaper sector is the London-based Financial Times, which also publishes several international editions. The Wall Street Journal
An Economist subscription also adds tremendous value. They offer the entire magazine--every single word--in audio each week to subscribers, and it is fantastic. All this for a year for the cost of what most people pay for a single month of cable. Talk about distorted priorities.
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
In today's world, W. Mark Felt would have had an anonymous identity and leaked good information to Firedoglake or Daily Kos. The blogs would have picked up on it. The information would have sounded credible and so a Rachel Maddow would have started to cover it in detail and the whole thing breaks a year earlier than it did under the Washington Post.
It wasn't "classy libs" that chose to use the term "teabag" to describe the actions of sending teabags to Obama, hold "teabagging" parties and the like. The clueless choice of term was quite rightly mocked, and this carries no sembleance to the results of your "thinking". As soon as you can point to official "buttfuck" parties held by Liberals, where they "buttfuck" right wingers, your "thinking" will accidentally appear insightful.
Perhaps that is what you're hoping will happen? Quite a coup if it happens, I say.