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NYTimes Confirms It Will Start Charging For Online News In 2011
jmtpi writes "The article is frustratingly vague, but the New York Times is confirming earlier speculation that it will start charging online readers who visit the site regularly. Occasional users will still get free access to a certain number of articles per month. Most of the key details are not yet determined, but the system is scheduled to be deployed at the beginning of next year."
The Times is planning on rolling its own pay system, and it will doubtless use the rest of 2010 to look at how sites like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times fare before deciding on specifics. How often do you readers typically hit articles at nytimes.com in a given month? We try to avoid linking to stories behind paywalls when possible, and if the Times chooses a low monthly limit, you'll probably see a lot fewer links to their site — which would be a shame.
The problem is that the "pay product printed on dead trees" was losing subscribers at a steady pace before they started producing the free digital product. The NYT's problem is that there are not enough people who want to pay for what they are selling to cover thier costs.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
"This time it's different!"
Yes, it is. Much more competition, the Great Recession, high unemployment. 3 more reasons to fail.
The industry needs massive consolidation - like maybe 90% of the print papers folding.
Back when NYTimes had set up a paywall/registration-required site, I never wanted to go through the hoops to get to an article. After they stopped doing that, it was just sort of habit not to read articles on the site. So why change now?
Towards the Singularity.
Let me first thank everyone who's submitted an article to Slashdot with a link to something I've written. The comments are almost always a great gift and I look forward to reading most of what people write, especially the ones who RTFA.
My only request is for everyone to be open to new ways of paying for the synthesis of information. It is very difficult for humans to compete with the robot link farms and the casual content created on places like Facebook. If we want people to synthesize we have to find some way to come together as a society and fund them.
I realize that it's attractive to look at the almost non-existent distribution costs of digital content and imagine a world where information can be completely free, but this avoids dealing with the costs of creating it in the first place. We need to find a good way for everyone who consumes content to effectively share the costs of creating it. If we don't, the information ecosystem will collapse.
Please be open to the writers and publishers who are going to try out more mechanisms for distributing the costs among the consumers. Try them out and reward the ones that deliver something of value. Ignore the ones that aren't worth your time. But please don't dismiss them out of hand.
Finally, I want to point out a piece I've written about some of the downsides of the free ecosystem for information. Perhaps this might suggest that there are some advantages in embracing a paywall, at least occasionally.
http://www.wayner.org/node/67
the reason they are losing relevance is because they chose to give up relevance in doing their newswork.
Instead of articles covering issues with the government we get tiger woods, britney spears smeared all over the front page. That would be, you know irrelevant as a news company yet every one of them, times included, does that.
So really, they're just speeding up the result of their own decision. good riddance.
"Fair Price" is exactly what will determine if this fails or succeeds.
NY Times Select would have been ok if it was say $12 a year instead of $50.
The problem is that the media seems to be happy to perpetuate the image that "people do not pay for media online". It's just not true.
How many people here pay for Pandora or Slacker? What about Fark? What about the new Ars subscriptions? What about forum accounts from SomethingAwful?
Frankly, what I really want would be a micro-transaction sort of system. I would be happy to pay 5 cents per article I read on NY times. Sounds tiny right? I'd say I read at least 5 articles on a week day. That's a quarter a day, $5 a month. More than the $50 they ask for.
Yet I'm sure more people would be attracted to the 5C per article model vs the $50 upfront subscription.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
Most would argue that the NYTimes has both original reporting and a better experience. Their website is nice and clean, and they're still one of (if not the) premier newspaper in the world. For example, they broke the NSA wiretapping story.
It would be highly damaging if they were to disappear. It's not like they could just be replaced.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
My idea (and I've actually cornered the CEO of the media company I work for in an elevator, and made him listen to it) is that all new news should be for-pay. You should have to subscribe or do a micro-transaction or something.
But after 2 weeks or a month, it should be free. That way you get your upfront revenue, but then you can take advantage of the long tail as well, and sell ads on that content.
The newspaper I work for is almost 200 years old (not a journalist, just a techie). Can you imagine the value of that much content if it were indexed and made available? This isn't wikipedia: this is primary source, research material. Stick an ad on it, and make your nickel off something that was written more than a hundred years ago.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The industry needs massive consolidation - like maybe 90% of the print papers folding.
Arguably, they already have. The newspapers have been merging with each other like crazy.
When it comes to producing "real news", there are only a few newspapers left beyond the local level. All newspapers that run national news subscribe to the wire services; they're really just sharing stories with each other.
When local "big" news breaks (e.g. shooting, bridge collapse), the wire service story starts as local news in the local paper, then gets picked up nationally.
For truly national news, only a few papers report it: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press's own reporters, plus the news networks and a few very high-end bloggers. That's about it for news gathering. Everybody else is just relaying it from the others.
Their international bureaus are nearly all gone as well, except for the papers I mentioned, and they're cut back.
The local papers still have a reason to exist, the local news, but for national and international, they get it faster and better online. Unfortunately, local news has a poor draw, and often doesn't even merit a daily paper, even in a medium-sized city.
You don't want to lose them; they do important work as the Fourth Estate on the local level. But nobody seems to care much about it.
You don't want to lose them; they do important work as the Fourth Estate on the local level. But nobody seems to care much about it.
I think people believe that good reporting appears out of nowhere, or something of that sort. They also seem to think that bloggers are the equivalent to professional journalists, instead of simply being the web equivalent of "talking heads".
I mourn for the loss of a vibrant press in the US simply because people want shit for free and can't stand to pay a buck for a paper.
I think some people believe that good reporting appears, period. My experience with news media is that they have distorted every story I've had personal knowledge of. Every so often, some journalist will be caught with outright lies and disciplined, but I don' t know how many get away with it.
I'm willing to pay for news (and I do), but I'd like the opportunity to pay for good journalism.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So groklaw.net isn't up to the standards of "professional journalism?"
Maybe you should talk to a few professional journalists ... they'll tell you about the on-the-job office politics, the ass-kissing, the stories that get spiked because someone's favourite ox is getting barbequed, the "we want to slant it differently", the "our stories have to reflect our new owners core values" ... amateurs can do as good a job, or better, simply because they don't have to kiss ass to keep their paycheck.
Don't count on any newspapers being around in 10 years.
Groklaw is the exception that proves the rule. It's also a bit too narrowly-focused and activist to be considered a "news source".
Maybe you're okay with that. I'm not.
Regardless of whether or not you're okay with it, it's changing, because newspapers no longer make sense.
Given the pre-Internet structure of the costs involved in collecting and distributing news, newspapers used to make perfect sense, both in terms of providing access to a moderately accurate snapshot of what's going on (if you think it was EVER highly accurate, you're fooling yourself) and as a business. But that's no longer the case, on either front.
With respect to the accuracy of the information, journalists always end up getting it a little bit wrong. Blogs actually do a much better job of reporting accurately, in part because they tend to have a narrow focus and deep knowledge about that focus, and in part because of reader comments. There is the potential disadvantage of bias, but I think the theoretical lack of bias in traditional news sources is overrated at the least -- and it's often pure fiction. Prior to the early 20th century newspapers were also openly biased, and that works just fine as long as you know what the bias is. In fact, I'd argue that it works better than reading something that is supposedly unbiased. At a minimum, reading clearly-biased news encourages you to read critically.
With respect to the business model, I don't really even need to go into it. Newspapers just don't work in an Internet-enabled world.
I think where we're heading is a world where deep investigative reporting is done primarily by amateurs, and I think they'll do it far better than the professionals ever did. Professional news organizations will still exist, but they'll be oriented primarily around local news and columns, plus collecting, sifting and publishing important blogger-written articles, all in a video soundbite format (much of the footage will be amateur) with embedded advertising. The future equivalent of a deep cover-to-cover read of a news paper will be sitting down with a feed of such soundbite articles and following the links to the deeper amateur coverage.
I'm sure that sounds distasteful to you, but I think it will result in coverage that is broader, deeper and more accurate, with less tolerance for misinformation or propaganda, precisely because everyone recognizes the constant possibility of propaganda.
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