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 honestly don't know what they are doing to cut costs - but if they believe they are becoming a "global newspaper of record" - then maybe they ought to cut ties with New York. I'm sure doing business in NYC ain't cheap - do they really need an entire building in midtown Manhattan? I could see an office - something like what they presumably have in DC - as a place for reporters who are literally on the local beat to do officey type things. But I'm willing to bet that the business of running the paper could be done just as well from the booneys as in the middle of the big apple for a whole lot less. Sure. you'd lose some die-hard manhattanite employees, but nobody's irreplaceable - especially when the world is changing as fast as the publishing world is...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Kevin Mitnick begs to differ.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Who would pay money to read Tom Freidman, the Mustache of Understanding?
Tell you what, though, I get the Sunday NYT delivered to my door every week. I almost quit when they stopped having a separate Books section, but I knew I'd miss the puzzles too much.
Anyway, how else would I get my subliminal liberal marching orders from Comrade Soros? I tried watching Fox News for a while but found myself gaining weight and wanting to do oxycontin. When I asked my wife to wear hairspray and librarian glasses and say "you betcha!" during sex, I knew I had to do something about it. Fortunately, there are liberal re-education camps called "libraries" where you can learn to break the Fox News habit.
After I stopped watching Fox News I lost the weight, and my wife was willing to sleep with me again, but hell, I still want to do me some of that hillbilly heroin.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The three posts I'm seeing so far all assume this will be the death knell of the Times. But the alternative if nothing changes is for the Times to piss all its money away until it closes its doors in bankruptcy. There has to be a happy medium. Somebody has to try to find it, and that's what the New York Times is doing now.
mrphoton says he'll read www.bbc.co.uk instead. That's all well and good, but the BBC is supported by British taxes, while the New York Times is a private newspaper. There's a strong tradition of separation of media and government in the U.S. and it isn't likely to ever change. But some have proposed operating newspapers as nonprofit organizations, which may be a close compromise. In that arrangement, newspapers would essentially be relying on government to leave them alone, by not charging them taxes. Where their operating expenses would come from, however, remains an open question.
To me, charging subscription fees for access to content makes a lot of sense. One of my favorite publications, The Economist, has always had a pay-wall around most of its content. And while advertising rates for magazines have been dropping across the board, subscriptions to The Economist have actually been climbing in the last few years. Why? Cynics say it's because people want to look intellectual by carrying around a copy of The Economist that they actually never read. People who subscribe to The Economist say they do so because of the marked differences between it and other, more traditional newspapers: The Economist prints zero celebrity gossip, and it never fiddles around with stories about car crashes or green gardening. It has a global focus. Its stories are well-researched, thorough, and not dumbed-down. In other words, if I'm going to pay to have someone deliver a stack of printed pages to my mailbox every week, The Economist will bring me far less wasted paper.
It's also mentioning that The Economist does not print any bylines for its articles. So to Tom Friedman's complaints, cry me a river. Do I subscribe to the New York Times because I want an informative, timely, in-depth news resource, or do I subscribe because I like to read so-called rock star columnists? Personally, I don't even read Tom Friedman's column, because his books have been massive disappointments. Talk about overrated. So should a guy like Tom Friedman be allowed to hold an entire news gathering organization hostage to his own ego? Tell you what, Tom: If you're such a public treasure, start a blog. Surely the people will flock to it. Or could it be that the only reason anybody read your column at all was because of the New York Times, and not the other way around?
The success of a subscription program for the Times' Web site will probably all depend on the price they charge for it. Certainly there will have to be opportunities to get stuff for free, as Salon.com has done. Even The Economist offers a 14-day free trial. Even then, the idea that anyone will pay even a fraction of the cost of a subscription to the New York Times just to read one or two articles a week -- or one or two articles a month -- is nuts. Somebody needs to do the hard research to figure out a realistic rate of payment for the content that people actually read. A monthly or yearly subscription fee, when nothing is showing up in the mailbox and you never remember to go and look at the site, isn't going to work.
At the same time, I worry about the concept of newspapers as a public good. Everyone, no matter their income level, is entitled to know what's going on in their government and the world at large. If newspapers close themselves off only to paying subscribers, you force the economically disadvantaged to venues such as TV news. On the one hand, local TV news has been turned over almost entirely to fluff. On the other, cable outlets like Fox News look increasingly like propaganda weapons.
So what to do? I've long tho
Breakfast served all day!
...and I don't think it's entirely out of greed. The simple truth is that you can't pay columnists, reporters and other staff unless you have sufficient revenue. If people are abandoning the print version of the paper, and advertisers don't see the return they expect from ads, you lose a lot of per-copy revenue and ad revenue.
The truth is that the old model of "sell a paper for $1.00 a day, collect $XM in ad revenue per year, and your profit is that less your employment and other costs" is going away. Now, quality media outlets are faced with a tough choice. (Yes, I know, we can debate quality, but I happen to like the Times.) They have to choose to provide their content free, while only recouping part of their costs from ad sales, or charging for content and hoping enough people like the paper enough to pay.
I see this causing two problems:
For journalism in general: When are people going to realize that actual journalism, investigative reporting, and other well-researched pieces cost money? Call me an old fogey if you want, but I think this transition we're going through is going to make it much tougher to get well-written, well-research, less-biased content. Look at how CNN has jumped in with both feet on the whole Web 2.0/Twitter/Facebook user-generated content. Some of the well-written stuff actually makes the television news, but the vast majority of it is a garbage dump compared to a legitimate news organization. Can you imagine the historical record of the Haitian earthquake filled with stuff like "OMG OMG teh quakez suX0rz dude" ? That's overblown, but you get the idea... Same thing goes for the reporting of both sides of an issue. Would you rather have a news organization making some attempt to neutrally report, or would you rather have the Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh blogs against the ACORN and ELF blogs? Investigative reporting is even more important, and I'm not talking about papparazzi stalking celebrities. Would Watergate have ever been uncovered without a news organization paying to cover it?
For employment: I've seen this kind of rationalization of every single penny of cost happening over the last few years. Outside of journalism, it happens every day...a software developer in India is 10% the cost of a US one, or we can eliminate this raft of manual processes by automating the whole thing. Some of this is good...I'm glad I'm not a file clerk at a huge insurance company, for example. But, it has to stop somewhere. There are some people who need mundane work. Manufacturing used to provide that, now it's gone. Not everyone can be a manager, or sell things, or manage projects. If you eliminate everyone's job, especially those at the low end of the skill spectrum, you're going to have a lot of unemployed consumers who can't buy your product.
The NYT (and subsidiaries like the Boston Rag, er, Globe) pass off op-eds as news and ignore stories which don't support their biases
What can I say? Citation needed.
I find some of the anti-journalism bias I see on this site to be a little scary. It seems like the kind of anti-intellectualism that allows our society to play right into the hands of propagandists and demagogues, and it's frankly not what I'd expect of the /. audience.
Breakfast served all day!
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
Open Source killed my software revenues (consulting)
Open source products actually make consulting easier for most people -- there are products the customer / consultant have actually heard of, and they can be implemented much sooner than a custom solution could be scoped, coded, tested and deployed. Now if you're doing old-school custom software what's killing you isn't necessarily open source, it's the internet. Having customers able to easily locate, choose, and download an application that meets their needs makes the idea of software customization -- in a lot of situations -- obsolete.
That said, I've been programming for a very long time. I saw the change coming and embraced it. If that's not your thing then so be it, but you should know the reasons and they are not "open source". It's not some dark voodoo, it's instant gratification, available for everyone. Blame the internet, blame competition, but many people are making money with Open Source software and I'm one of them.
If a car analogy helps you, it's like the local car dealer keeping the local prices high for years because there weren't any other choices around, and boom! CarMax moves into the next town. Local people now have choice. Why would they want to use the local car dealer? If you can't answer that, then you (as the local car dealer) will be forced into another career choice. You must provide added value that the customer will not only understand, but will pay for. CarMax isn't the problem, it's that you are still running on an antiquated business model that provides no value proposition for the consumer. CarMax just provided the catalyst for your customers to understand they are no longer without options. Blaming CarMax only shows you don't understand the problem.
This isn't Flamebait. We're talking about why media is failing these days, and this is absolutely relevant.
Currently Fox news is #1 and this is what they're serving up for the public. It's unethical, misleading, and just plain flat-out wrong. And currently (if the numbers mean anything) this is what the public actually wants.
This should scare the absolute crap out of you.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.