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.
I hope and wonder if people who subscribe to print/paper version will get free online access. If they don't it will be pretty greedy. I believe Wall Street Journal provides free online with a paper subscription.
But the big issue with the NYT is that despite being a global player, it still has this New York focus that makes it less useful for those of us not in New York. The BBC does truly global coverage, and there's no American equivalent. NYT is the closest we have, but they're going to have to do more to prove that they're a global player and not just a regional paper with really good national and international coverage before I pull out my wallet.
Occasional users will still get free access to a certain number of articles per month. Most of the key details are not yet determined
Wait, is that key details in the ARTICLE?
Scientists warn of a deadly meteor that will hit the earth in 3 days striking the state of (register to read more)
Summation 2
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
I don't pay for access to news (unless looking at ads counts as paying). Few single news sources cover a high enough percentage of the kinds of stories I am interested for me to allocate actual money to said sources. I'd like access to Nature, and New Scientist, and a number of technical sources, but rely on "second hand" access as other free sources report on *their* stories. Given that I rarely complete covering these summaries in a day before I have to actually deal with life in the real world, I don't think it is worth my money to get access to things I don't have time to ready anyway.
The Fate of any news service behind a pay wall or limited free pay wall is obscurity. No news story in the NY Times can remain exclusive to the NY Times unless nobody cared about that story in the first place.
But I like the idea that they are going to "wait and see" how others will fare over the year. I don't have to wait, I can tell them their growth and revenue will be flat at best. Them kind of returns are not going to excite the NY Times, and I'd bet in the end this will never really happen.
- which would be a shame.
Is this the slashdot mafia coming out? "Nice article. Shame is something were to... happen to our link to it."
Actually, there are only a handful sources of similar content of similar quality, and the two that immediately spring (WSJ and the Economist) are behind pay walls.
God knows the NYT has its flaws (WMD and Whitewater, as high-profile examples), but in terms of original national (US) reporting it's way above the AP or the BBC. I think the WSJ is (was?) better, but their big stories (Enron, back-dating options, Vioxx, for example) are obviously business related. McClatchy seems to have an edge documenting issues with the 'official unnamed' sources, but doesn't do as much elsewhere. Most other quality sites simply do different things altogether.
Personally, I pay for the WSJ and browse the NYT free on line. This will probably make me switch to the NYT for a year and see how I like it as a daily news source. So, yeah, in my one case their strategy will work.
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!
It's either this or continue the slow boil. However, I would be more willing to spend my cash for an aggregation service like Google News or something similar. I use the Internet to get my news not just because it is convenient, but also because the number of sources I can easily review gives me broader coverage. I have no idea if the Times play will be successful, but I do think they need to examine their business - they aren't just a newspaper company anymore, nor is CNN television news anymore - they're both in the business of news and opinion in general, and are thus competing on similar playing fields. Perhaps the answer lies in "partnerships" - I would pay for a news partnership that included World, National, and Local news that consisted of, say, MSNBC, The New York Times, and the Denver Post. I have no idea how feasible it is - this is just my $.02 on what I would pay for.
I regularly read The Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail (I apologise in advance; it's just that I like to know what Fascist Britain is getting up to from time to time) online. I wouldn't read any of these if they were behind a pay wall. I did subscribe to the FT for a month (a free month) but what was contained therein was not compelling enough for me to actually give them a monthly sub. I can get free news elsewhere, e.g. the BBC online website (leftist, ethnic-peace bicycle politically correct news I grant you, but news nonetheless) and various blogs.
The fact of the matter is that most people when compelled to pay, will simply move their viewing elsewhere. As long as there are places to get news online free of charge, pay-walls won't work for the masses. I guess the next step of course, once the pay-walls have gone up, is to claim copyright over any and every story to prevent publication in blogs!
I'm okay with paying for the New York Times. I agree the quality of their articles makes it worth it. Lengthy, well-researched content costs money to produce, and people like myself and the rest of the Internet thrives on the professionally-produced news. Without it, Slashdot and my blog would have much less to link to.
Where I am against this is the implementation. New Scientist magazine and the WSJ have both gone the metered/subscription route. So if I want to access their content, that's two sets of usernames and passwords to keep track of, and payment for content I'm only reading incidentally because I got referred to it from another site. Add the NYT's to this, and it's three sites I have to manage and pay for.
The proper solution was for the newspapers to establish a single-access paid-for system where we can access all their content and have the papers get paid a percentage based on the popularity of their content. They are apparently shunning this logical strategy for an anarchy of individual strategies that will confuse, frustrate, and drive away consumers.
I love newspapers, I want them to succeed, and I think this old push-media strategy is going to drive away more readers than it will convince readers to pay for content.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
As this article at The Atlantic points out, the NY Times makes more money from subscriptions than from advertising. If they can get enough money from subscribers then they don't need to worry about page rank, hits, click-throughs, etc.
Best Slashdot Co
I have been paying for Wall Street Journal Online for possibly as long as 10 years. Robert Murdoch, who purchased it a few years back, has been changing the pay model a lot to maximize revenues. I'm likely to unsubscribe over the next month or so for the first time since I first began using their online service instead of paper. Here are the changes that have made it worse for paying customers:
1> Added advertising for paid subscribers. 2> Confused what is free and what is paid for. This is a never ending moving target. It is very confusing when you try to share something with non-subscribers. 3> Huge price increases at renewal time that I have to renegotiate over the phone. 4> They throw their video content on the home page, which you go to about 20 times a day. On laptops I use all day in an office environment, I have volume muted so do not benefit from this. Yet, it freezes Firefox while it downloads the content for about 20-30 seconds every time I click on the home page. I've asked them to remove it, to no avail. 5> Announced that blackberry access will no longer be included with regular online access. Separate fee required. This, to me, is the straw that is breaking the camels back, and why I will unsubscribe as soon as this goes into effect.
It is sad to see the NYT follow the WSJ's lead in this. I'm willing to pay for content, but they really do need to find a model that works and stick with it instead of changing it every 3 months. They are pushing long-time paying customers like me away.
Erik
Open Standards Portal
That's the thing, companies need to work within the market realities. There are niche's everywhere but my opinion is that the NYT does not fall into many of them in comparison to existing offerings. If they are really running themselves into the red as they say then as you say they should cut back or restructure. Or do something else. But making people pay while there exists free alternatives is just plain dumb. Perhaps some day there will be no alternatives for institutional news, but you know what would scare the crap out of them: so what, I'll take decentralized news that is marked up through multiple filters of people for free and bookmark the citizen hub sources I find useful in particular. Newspapers are just another industry the Internet is washing over, they think they're owed an existence?
Shh.
People who think that Teabaggers are reasonable, intelligent members of a grassroots political group consider the NYT to be of dubious journalistic quality.
Fixed that for ya.