Slashdot Mirror
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.
Cue "OMFG They're so irrelevant!" whiners.
Frankly, it's about time. They spend millions a year to produce a product (written news stories) and they have two delivery formats for said product: One, a pay product printed on dead trees, which accounts for the vast majority of their revenue. And two, a free digital product that doesn't make shit, with the added bonus that it makes their paying product worthless.
Seems like a no-brainer. Now, the question becomes, will they charge a fair price, or will they pull a record company move, and try to charge the same for a physical and a digital product?
One thing is for sure. If it works out for them, you're going to see tons of print outlets following suit.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Slate did this, the NYT should talk to their management about lessons learedn.
They used to be a popular well read site that decided that a paywall was the way to, regardless of what their readers told them. They later added an interactive ad that you had to get through as a means of allowing people to visit without paying. By the time the word they changed back to an ad based site for free the damage was done. By then it was too late and a fair part of their user base had been alienated and simply moved on.
How many people would be surprised that Slate is no longer a pay site, and you can simply read it without any hoops? I would imagine a fair number of people as they probably haven't visited the site in years. For the meanwhile, the damage has been done and Slate is a shadow of their former self.
I've said before, and I'll say it again, the news is a commodity, if you want visitors you have to differentiate yourself against Reuters and the Associated Press. You can either do that with original reporting and or a better experience. Adding a paywall only works with a substantial investment in one or both, witness the Wall Street Journal which has original repoorting of high quality for an example and has been behind a paywall for years.
It's not a matter of being the most reliable; it's a reliable, content-generating, influential news source.
A very small percentage of our summaries link to the NYTimes. Regardless, we're always disappointed when a site we occasionally link turns into a pay site. Some stories we can pick up elsewhere, some we can't.
The bigger problem is that it's one less source -- not just a link target, but a source -- that provides tech news. And other sites are assuredly watching and taking cues from the NYT, the WSJ, etc., to see how they can either turn a profit or turn a bigger profit. A drop in the bucket, perhaps, but enough drops will fill the bucket. As more and more sites put up paywalls, news junkies will have less free news to read.
On the other hand, nobody reads the linked articles anyway, so maybe it's not so bad!
Mod parent up! :)
Seriously, people here love to talk about how the "new economy" makes it possible to remove "artificial scarcity" and make it so everything is free.
What these people ignore is that, even if it costs no money to copy something, it still costs money to create something. There is still, in this "new economy", the very real economics that the majority of content people use (Computer programs, movies, music, television programs, written articles, etc.) is content that would not exist if someone wasn't being paid to make it.
I enjoy reading all of the articles on the New York Times' front page every morning, and understand I soon may need to pay for the privilege of reading the quality journalism and writing the the NYT offers.
Now, I'm sure someone will point to open source software and say "Mr. MaraDNS, you don't know about open source software and how this proves that we can have all the compelling content we want for free in the 'new economy'". I will point out to people who think like this that I am, in fact, a developer of open-source software.
People who think open-source software (OSS) makes it possible for all content to be free don't understand how OSS changes the relationship between the developer and the user. A lot of people think an OSS program is like a commercial program, but free, and that they can ask for features or get support for free, and it gets pretty tiring to have people email me asking for free support, even though I make it clear that I don't provide free email support for my program.
The thinking behind OSS is that I donate some of my coding time and effort to the greater community. In return, people are free to contribute bug fixes or improvements to the program, or supply support on the mailing list. For example, someone wanted better IPv6 support, supplied patches, and now MaraDNS has good IPv6 support. Another person wanted better Windows service support, and supplied patches to make MaraDNS' new recursive core be a full Windows service. Other people answer user's questions on the mailing list or translate documentation. Webconquest very generously provides me a free Linux shell account and hosting for the web site.
Likewise, I found an OSS Doom random generator I liked and provided bug fixes and improvements to it; when I lost interest in it, another person became the maintainer and improvements continue to be made even though I no longer work on that code. And, there is a Free Windows Civilization clone for Windows which I have provided a bug fix and extended the documentation with.
OSS doesn't mean we have the right to demand all content be free or are justified in pirating media and software. OSS means that we can, together, make free content which complements the for-pay content out there.
MaraDNS is an open-source DNS server.
Thanks for responding, Mr. Wayner. It's interesting to hear from someone on the inside of this issue. I find that I disagree with a lot of the points you listed in the linked piece. But I find a lot of value in the insight you offer.
Having said that - I had no idea who the heck you were. I had to consult Google to get some indication. I hit Wikipedia to get a bit more insight. With that in mind, I thought giving your piece a look was worthwhile. If any of that was locked behind paywalls, I would have zipped along on my merry way, dismissing you out of hand as yet another curiosity that I don't have the motivation to pursue over the boundaries set before me.
How supporting you as an author while not putting up too great a boundary works... well... now, that is the question, isn't it? It'll be interesting to watch (in so far as train wrecks invoke a certain facination). But I don't believe the NY Times has the answer.
I should note that my interest is a little more than average freeloading consumer of information. My father is a noted author in his small field. But he has always had to struggle with the economics of that activity. It has always been difficult to make money doing what he does - at least on his niche subject matter. He has a current project that ran in to a dead end with the traditional publishing route and we are currently looking at a more open tactic (open publishing of the bulk of the project linked with paid references, teaching aids, and speaking engagements). I hope my fascination with my father's project isn't the aforementioned train-wreck variety; only time will tell. But I do know that traditional strategies / pay walls have only served my father so far.