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, 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.
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.
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
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.