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."
I'm sure I'll read about its death gasps eventually in a posting by some high quality blogger who does it for love.
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.