Slashdot Mirror
NYTimes Unveils Online Subscription Plan
An anonymous reader writes "The NYTimes announces their three pricing tiers for digital access. An interesting note: 'Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.'"
Judith Miller. To paraphrase a surprisingly insightful comment from Ben Affleck, the NYT might be revered by older generations who lived through their glory days, but as someone who started following politics around Clinton's impeachment, the first thing I saw them do was sell a bullshit war and quite probably staff CIA-friendly propagandists.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The NYT business model is now a 3 legged dead horse.. flog away.
While I'm paying for BBC news in London via the TV license, I won't miss the Murdoch machine that much. I do read the NYT once a day, but if they put up a paywall then I won't bother - there is simply enough news to go around. Murdoch put a paywall up on the London Times last year, which I stopped reading daily. Their readership plummeted. Obviously the London Times was a test bed with a large audience, you from what I've read, NYT will do everything they do not to make that same mistake. Time will tell if they have struck a fair enough balance between free and paid-for material.
I'm really upset about this. I love the NYT and it's my favorite general news source; but I simply can't justify paying that much. I guess us poor people who read a lot of news aren't in their target demographic.
At 35USD every 4 weeks, they overpriced by a wide margin. Clearly they missed this article. Try 35USD/yr and I might think about it.
I'm confused. Why would I ever want to pay for news?
I've got free news from: cnn.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, bbc.uk, new radio, various news apps on my smartphone, and tens of thousands of idiotic commentary available to me across the web.
What has NYT got that I can't get elsewhere for free?
I'm very conflicted by this move from the times. In my opinion nytimes.com is one of the best sources of journalism on the web, and I've always been concerned that in the long run their business model wouldn't be sustainable. I think that paying money to support good journalism makes a lot of sense -- it's too important not to.
But $15/mo for the entry level? That's really disappointing. There are many readers that will not be able to afford this. I was hoping the entry level would be closer to the $5/mo mark.
Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit.
That's good to know... the referer header is easy to forge.
This is a great way to get me to stop reading the NYT at work. Now, if only Slashdot would do the same thing I might actually get some work done.
They are launching the pay wall in Canada first, effective immediately.
Everything time something "good" rolls out from the USA (Hulu, iPhone, iPad, lots of shit from Amazon), it takes forever for it to get to Canada, if it gets here at all. Now this (definitely not "good") and they launch it in Canada first. Go figure.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
So, wont we soon have browser addons to add referrers to the links to make use of this loophole??
'Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles
Will the subscription come without ads, or perhaps at least without any ads you would not see in the newspaper? Doubtful of course, but I'm not going to pay that kind of subscription fee and still be blinked at.
I personally think $15 is a little steep. I'd pay $5... I'm a daily reader of the NYTimes online, but news can come from many sources, not just the Times. I guess if I really want to read a story I'll just post it for myself in Facebook and follow the link...
The New York Times hasn't been a credible news source for decades now. Everyone has moved to BBC, Al Jazeera, and other British news outlets. This will go nowhere and they will continue to die.
Why would I ever want to pay for news?
Because it has value to you. People have been paying for news or information (one way or another) for a long time. Information has value and people ARE willing to pay for it. I certainly am and I suspect you are too, at least up to a point.
The problem is that it's very difficult to figure out exactly what information is valuable to specific people and even harder to place a dollar value on that information. What I value is certainly different than what you value and our willingness to pay is different. Additionally, information is an experience good. You don't actually know exactly how valuable a piece of information is to you until after you have that information and payment can't reasonably be demanded for information you already have. It also is a wasting product, meaning that its value often drops with time.
Mass news media (newspapers, tv, etc) was able to get around this by having advertisers foot the bill for much of the cost and simply presenting a broad spectrum of news to the public coupled with a distribution monopoly. They didn't have to figure out what you value specifically because they threw enough information into their product that something was likely to be of value to your.
The distribution monopoly has been broken and with it much of the economic rents the newspapers and mass media enjoyed. People will still pay for news, but the price is going to have to drop. Newspapers will no longer enjoy outsized profits. They still can be profitable, just not in their current forms and not likely with the same margins. People will pay for news but not in the same way and probably not as much.
Most newspapers have very opaque access policies - they'll let you read their articles, even old ones (if you search through google to get them, for example); but, at the same time, they let you register. Others (like the Washington Post) give basically open access to their site, but will prompt you, seemingly at random, to register, but only for some articles.
To compound the issue, most papers now have a 'regular' section, and 'blog' sections; logic would dictate there be different access policies for the two, but I've never seen any published.
I've tried to work out patterns for these places as part of some of the work I do, and for me they've been indecipherable.
From a purely selfish point of view, I'm not happy about the NY Times charging for access, but I am happy that they're clearly laying out what readers can and can't get.
Oh well, guess I'll just have to switch to the Washington Post. New York Times is very pro-war and constantly bashes China in a tasteless way that should really make them ashamed. Still they were generally the best available as far as American news goes but I will have no problem switching to the Post. If they try a pay wall on that I'll just start reading overseas English language papers. I'm not paying to read a bunch of war cheerleading China-bashing Islamophobic tripe. Sometimes I read it and wonder if they're trying to troll me to post a comment or they actually believe the biased crud they report with a straight face.
How long until someone crawls the NYT site and links all the stories from their Facebook account? What recourse would the NYT have, since they obviously have the capability to block this but have chosen not to?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
but you know what? I don't care because they're already irrelevant. They lost relevance around the time they staffed people like Judith Miller, Adam Nagourney, and Jayson Blair. Do I want to know something real? Well, in English I turn to the BBC. Because I also speak those languages, Der Spiegel and Le Monde as well.
For everything else, I read eyewitness reports. And why shouldn't I? Media channels like the NYTimes long ago spun down their foreign operations. They rely on eyewitnesses too, same as me. Except when I read them, I get them straight without the corporate spin.
Opinion? I believe my opinion, based on congressional whitepapers and original documents, is at least as valid as the semi-literate people who populate the New York Times and its cousins these days.
News as an activity will always exist. But newspapers and news channels on TV and news sites on the web surrendered their authority when they decided it was cheaper and more profitable to report opinion as fact and eschew the whole fact part entirely. You don't get that authority back, after you've taken that drastic step, so if you based your business model on it then you are out of luck, my friend. Welcome to the dustbin of history!
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Suppose I pay you $2.50 a month, and you tell me what the Times says?
Their site says:
Yes, NYTimes.com visitors can enjoy 20 free articles each calendar month as well as unrestricted access to browse the home page, section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds
Unless they make visitors register (which doesn't seem to be the case, I just read a few articles without registering), then if I just delete my nytimes.com cookies can't I keep going back for unlimited free articles? Even if I have to register, I can just use multiple email addresses - gmail makes that trivial, I can have "myname+nytimes1@gmail.com, myname+nytimes2@gmail.com, etc. and they all go to my inbox.
Well, put a stick in it, the Times is dead... What maroons! Oh well, plenty of other news sources out in cloudville that aren't so stupid.
People who get content from the internet are not getting it "for free," they are paying a monthly fee for it. The fee does not go to the content providers, but that makes no difference from the user's perspective. The situation is analogous to having to pay a monthly subscription fee to the US Postal Service in order to receive mail. If internet access were free (or much cheaper), I would be happy to pay for the small amount of content that is actually useful to me. As it is, I am not going to pay $50/month for home broadband, $80/month for a smartphone plan, and an additional $35/month for content, for a total of $165/month just to read the news. If I really wanted to get my news "for free," I would buy a $5 radio.
the New York Times a jingoistic advocate of the Iraq War? Thomas PM Barnett likened the run-up to this war as one of a cop shouting "He's got a gun!" as his pals burst thru a front door.
RefControl is a nice firefox plugin that lets you set your referer on a per site basis. I'm guessing it's usage will spike after this. I've got my default option to always say I came from the domain of the current page. In the case of the NYTimes, It's going to always say I came from Twitter (Even though I never touch the place).
Unfortunate. They want too much. I usually buy a copy and then refer back to things I'm interested online later on. With this I suspect I'll be not only giving up the online access to the NYT but paper version as well. I really didn't have any objections to paying but it's too much for me.
Same concept different content.
Or you can try Ongo.com.
It has the NYT and others with no Ads for $6.99 a month.
http://www.ongo.com/
We are running a promotion for one month free and $4.99 a month for the next 6:
http://www.ongo.com/accounts/registration.php?promo=BRIAN
Full disclosure, I wrote the iPad app for Ongo.
Will the subscription come without ads, or perhaps at least without any ads you would not see in the newspaper? Doubtful of course, but I'm not going to pay that kind of subscription fee and still be blinked at.
Hear, hear!
On the bright side, $15/mo is a relatively big stick that we can wield to make demands about the quality of both the content and the user interface. As it stands now, we have no economic leverage aside from the nanoamount of ad revenue that NYT will lose if you or I stop reading their rag online.
But as paying customers, we can actually demand changes. Stop showing blinky ads. Stop adding annoying user interface controls that no one asked for. Stop running stories that are obviously paid-for PR placements. These are the kinds of things that you used to be able to write in about, and get heard, when you were a paying subscriber.
And if $15/mo isn't enough to get their attention, it is now trivially easy to form a NYT Readers Union and make demands collectively. 5000 readers threatening to unsubscribe at that price is bound to get somebody's attention.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I might pay for a site that doesn't use gray text on a gray background like SOME people!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
My basic view on the New York Times is that it is best read the way the Soviets used to read Pravda: The purpose of reading it isn't to learn the truth, it's to learn what those in power want you to think.
That's not a useless exercise, but it's also not what it appears to be.
Well, you can tell by the way I post my reply,
I know my stuff for a geeky guy.
I come to Slashdot for my news.
I'm a techie dude; I just can't lose.
Now it's alright. It's okay. You may look the other way.
But we can try to understand the New York Times' effect on man.
Ah, ah, ah, ah, modded +5, modded +5.
Ah, ah, ah, ah modded plus fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I think paying $360/year to read it on my iPhone and iPad is an absolute bargain.
Who's with me?
you don't have to read news meant for people that DON'T pay for news.
The kind of information that's in free news sites (Fox, HuffingtonPost, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc..) is VERY different from paid news sites.
Free, advertiser supported news is the horribly written and generally meant for 3rd graders, and is rather useless. I don't even know why people bother with free news sites. You get about 1 sentence of actual information, which is usually just a SEO friendly link-bait headline, and the rest is just filler junk, if it contains anything at all. There's so little value in their content. You can skim just the headlines, and you'll get the basics.
Paid sites tend to have longer articles, with more information per article, bigger pictures, videos, more research, etc...
I fully expect newspapers to regain footing when they start to figure out that they don't have to compete against free headline news sites because people find them generally useless.
Alot of hostility here toward the NYT. My guess is most of the critics rarely read it. Let's face it - it's the best paper in the US and it is NOT a mouthpiece of the government, get real. If you don't like it, don't pay for it and don't read it. Just keep getting your news from Facebook, Twitter, Comedy Central...etc.
With so many free and often updated news sources, why would anyone want to restrict themselves to just one. Let alone, pay huge fees and be limited on how much you can read it. If they were charging $1/year, I wouldn't be buying - it's not like they have anything to offer that's unique anyway. Nearly every article they print is also shared with other news sources via AP, and is re"printed" on many free websites. I'm sure there are some old people with their jitterbug phones that are still into newspapers like nyt, but in my mind newspapers were dead years ago; they're just twitching like a dying rat in a trap now.
Well, once I inevitably pay for their online service, I won't feel guilty about putting AdBlock back on my computer.
It'd be one thing if the NYTimes was just another outlet re-hashing AP and Reuter stories. But, they actually do their own reporting, and their own writing, and I generally find it valuable to me. $15/month isn't cheap, but considering that I donate significantly more than that every month to my local NPR station, I'll probably bite the bullet and subscribe.
I don't respond to AC's.
Their quality is generally good. I sometimes don't agree with their editorials - but the cost is *WAY* too high. Continuing to access it the way I do - from multiple devices - I would pay $35/month or $420/year. Nearly the cost of a new iPad each year or even a 0.99/app each and every day all year long. Nooo... I don't think so.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
The price is too high. There won't be a rush of subscribers
The number of freebies -- with tweets and fb and limited searching -- will satisfy most, but clicks out of idle curiosity will disappear. And if the clicks disappear, so do the advertisers.
Just how many avid readers do they have? How does this remedy the Times Select move?
Here's why the news business is out of touch with competition on the Internet:
that rockets don't work in space and that a physics professor knew less physics than what was taught in a high school?
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Seems like everybody in the media and quite a few here on Slashdot are not understanding the $15 for 4 weeks is not the same thing as $15 for a month. The tradition understanding of a 'month' is 12 months per year. There are 13 '4-week-months' in a year, not 12.
52 / 4 = 13 'months'
Filmo The Klown
(1) Split an account with your friends or office (2) 20 free articles -- there's got to be a way to spoof that. Deleting cookies + changing IP #'s would probably do that. (3) Fake referrers from search engines or Facebook, though they may have ways of verifying Also, why doesn't NYT also have a daily option like their dead-tree version? You should be able to buy a copy, download the whole thing to your laptop or tablet, and be able to read it on the plane without being forced to pay for a 4-week period!
That reminded of a common quotable from the British political satire TV show Yes Minister:
Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers:
* The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country;
* The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country;
* The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country;
* The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country;
* The Financial Times is read by people who own the country;
* The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country;
* And The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.
Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?
Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
They had a pay-for-prime-content plan 4 years ago, before the economy tanked. It didn't fly then.
So, now they add "tiers" and take another shot. Anybody running a pool on how long it lasts this time?
I did say it was a general problem (maybe I should have added 'as well' at the end of my sentence to clarify); thanks for your extensive clothing example.
Definitely with you on that "fashion as often overpriced and/or impractical" sentiment, as well as many of the other parts of your comment, although maybe not your specific preferences.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
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