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

Re:Oh well: me, too

[mikael_j]

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):

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).

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

Re:Oh well

[gander666]

Oh, my world for some mod points.