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Who Will Control the Cost of the NYT On Digital Readers?
RobotRunAmok writes "Ryan Tate, at Gawker, describes the 'heated turf war' waging at the New York Times. The print and digital divisions have differing views over how much a subscription to the Gray Lady (iPad edition) should cost. The print troops believe $20-$30 monthly is the proper price point (fearing that setting the mark any lower will jeopardize print distribution), while the digital soldiers are digging in their heels at $10 a month. The Kindle version is already managed by the Print Army, so don't count on logic necessarily driving any decisions here. It's complicated: the Web version of the paper is still free through 2011, and the computer 'Times Reader' has already been released and priced at $14.95 monthly."
If only that were true - I don't know what the situation is in the US, but over here most of the newspapers switched from investigative journalism to barely informed gossip a couple of decades ago (facts are expensive, gossip is cheap, if you want to cut your costs you just boost the noise to signal ration some more). For them to now argue that they're better than blogs because of the high quality of their journalism is laughable.
I find it a bit hard to believe that the daily cost of presses, press staff and press consumables is equal to or less than the daily cost of web servers. Do you have any numbers to back up your claim? After all, the computers that the advertising, journalism and production staff use are there whether or not you are printing on paper.
This guy says that the cost of printing the New York times is of the order of US$500 million per year. That seems pretty unbelievable too but if true would amount to something like US$1.4 million per day. I looked at the financial statement of the New York times where they list the cost of raw materials for 2006, 2005 and 2004 as (millions US$ per year) 331, 321 and 297.
This site suggests daily paper costs for the New York Times to be about 1/10 of the above estimate. Based on the financial report this is just wrong.
US$1 million per day would run a hell of a server room.