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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 Wall Street Journal is a great alternative with much less bias.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
USA Today is a piece of junk newspaper that has no original insight and practically no actual reporting. It is in no way a substitute for the NYT.
I'm sure I'll read about its death gasps eventually in a posting by some high quality blogger who does it for love.
As much as we don't like paying for content, someone has to pay for for the journalist to do their job.
I will argue that a lot of those so called "journalists" are not doing much reporting beyond writing what thoughts occur inside their heads about various issues. And that type of reporting I can get from John down on the corner writing in his blog. As many others have said in their replies on this thread; there is a lot of dead weight in this industry. A relatively small number of journalists are going around seeing, hearing, asking, and fact checking; most seem to be permanently stuck inside their offices whining about the unfairness of "teh internets".
Quite frankly I expect a large number of those that consider themselves journalists to be out of job ten-twenty years down the line. With internet blogs covering most of the opinion piece market, and only a small number of very active people being able to live off being what one could call a full-time journalist. Already a lot of pieces on various sites are written by people who have other jobs (mostly well-knowns from various industries; especially the entertainment industry, and a range of authors).
How much will this content cost? I have no idea, but someone will pay for it.
What the next decades will uncover is exactly what type of content people will pay for and how much they will pay. Maybe my speculation is way off, maybe not; time will tell. One thing is for certain what we get in the end won't look much like what we got right now. And a lot of people will fall by the wayside as the industry changes.
The Long Now Foundation
The New York Times? What's that?
Sadly, I'm still more informed than someone who gets all their news from Fox News,. . .
You have been around a while. I don't think the /. crowd is being anti-intellectual in their attack on journalism they are simply presenting a fairly uniform position:
1) High quality journalism means doing substantial research and papers don't provide that at all.
2) Mid quality journalism means doing lots of research quickly.
3) Low quality journalism is summarizing and presenting common information.
The web completely does the low part using aggregation. That's the bulk of what newspapers do today. Papers like the WSJ do mid quality work and they are being treated supportively. For political news though the blogsphere also does a good job. I don't see evidence that most of what is in the NYTimes meets the mid quality standard.
This morning. I suggest you read more.
In the NY Times?! Humbug.
He obviously isn't saying that every thing they print is untrue. He's correctly pointing out that the NY Times editorializes on every page, and prints ridiculously biased stories that push their political agenda. Those who agree with that political agenda think that the paper is the penultimate in journalism, since it's an echo chamber for their worldview. In fact, having done so many times, I can spot someone of the liberal persuasion by their fastidious reading of the Times. Talking with them for 10 minutes will confirm it.
There are those who read the occasional story, and that gives no guidance. But those who are always toting a copy or have the site as their home page are 99% liberal.
Disclaimer: I get most of my news from BBC, though they are heavily biased as well. Knowing the bias helps to nullify it, I just get more info more quickly from BBC News. However, what they *choose* to report on creates a bias that is not so easily nullified. Take for example the lack of balanced coverage on CRU.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.