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.

Comments

Duh.

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:Duh.

[Attila Dimedici]

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.

Re:Duh.

[tomhudson]

It won't work. They already know this - they've tried it before. Stupidity is doing the same thing you did before and expecting different results.

"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.

Re:Duh.

[poetmatt]

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.

Re:Duh.

[FileNotFound]

"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.

Re:Duh.

[maxume]

I'd be more interested in cheap, short subscriptions (say, $0.25 for 12 hours).

That would work out to a pretty pricey annual rate, but it would fit the way I access their content.

Re:Duh.

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:Duh.

[jfengel]

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.

Re:Duh.

[SatanicPuppy]

Well, the cost of a daily print subscription to the New York Times is 14.80...For a week. Mind you, that's to my house, and I live a long fucking way from NYC (checked it against my old NYC zip code, and it's only 11.70 there).

So, given that the bitch costs 800 bucks a year for us plebes who don't live in New York, and only around 600 for the pricks who do, I'm guessing that 50 bucks a year would be a bit of a steal. =P

Re:Duh.

[Knara]

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.

Re:Duh.

[david_thornley]

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.

Re:Duh.

[tomhudson]

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".

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.

Re:Duh.

[swillden]

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.

If I subscribe to paper version?

[blahbooboo]

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.

Key Details

[Rik Sweeney]

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)

I never access NYTimes.

[autophile]

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?

A word of thanks and a request

[peterwayner]

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

Re:A word of thanks and a request

[MaraDNS]

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.

Re:A word of thanks and a request

[_Sprocket_]

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.

Re:A word of thanks and a request

[peterwayner]

Publishers don't create....

The older I get, the more I appreciate the hard work of the editors who fix most of my errors and the sales team that collect the money from the advertisers and subscribers. They create an environment that helps me, the nominal creator and the only one who gets a byline, produce something that's better.

Now it may be that the market will decide that they don't want to pay extra for these layers. That's a decision that all of us will make consciously or unconsciously when we decide what content we want to consume. But there's no doubt that they do something.

The grey lady should look before leaping

[onyxruby]

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.

Re:The grey lady should look before leaping

[slimjim8094]

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.

Re:The grey lady should look before leaping

[dachshund]

Slate did this, the NYT should talk to their management about lessons learedn.

You make a number of valid points. However, I believe that you're talking about Salon.com. Slate is and (with possibly some limited exceptions I'm not aware of) an advertising-supported site that still gets tons of links and traffic.

On a more substantive note, two things: (1) stories will still be free to users who read only a few per month, which helps to avoid the Salon.com problem. (2) It doesn't take effect until 2011 which means they still have time to abandon the whole thing if advertising revenues tick upwards.

I still think it's a rotten idea.

Re:Why would it be a shame?

[Soulskill]

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!

Why the WSJ Online is hurting their customers

[Openstandards.net]

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