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.'"

Comments

Two words why I'll never buy a NYT subscription

[GodfatherofSoul]

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.

Re:Two words why I'll never buy a NYT subscription

[sarbonn]

I definitely agree. When I attended West Point, one of the requirements at that time was that you were required to read the New York Times every morning (it was delivered to every cadet room, so you shared it with your roommates). Since then, I've always tended to steer towards the newspaper, thinking of it as a quality one, but the fact is it's gotten horribly bad over the years (specifically the time you pointed out). To make matters worse, the NYT still thinks it is the newspaper it used to be in the 1960s, even trying to charge the highest amount for a newspaper that is printed. Even on Kindle, it demands $20, whereas a newspaper like The Washington Post (which I do subscribe to now) is only $12 a month. For reasons that have long been gone, the NYT keeps trying to live in an era where it was the newspaper of quality, but it has relaxed its editorial process so much over the years to where there are times I see it as a little better than some blogs and containing no more content than the AP wires.

Re:Two words why I'll never buy a NYT subscription

[dkleinsc]

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.

Re:Two words why I'll never buy a NYT subscription

[ZankerH]

A 'Soviet' is a type of administrative council, not a denonym for citizens of the former Soviet Union.

Re:Two words why I'll never buy a NYT subscription

[MightyYar]

A 'Soviet' is a type of administrative council, not a denonym for citizens of the former Soviet Union.

Just like "Shimmer", it's both!

Did you just graduate from a course or something? The word "Soviet" has been used in the West for decades to describe citizens and the government of the Soviet Union. It is also commonly used as an adjective to describe other things associated with the USSR. That's what happens when you put the word "Soviet" in your country name.

Re:Two words why I'll never buy a NYT subscription

[MaskedSlacker]

You must have recently immigrated to America. Welcome. For your first lesson in American idiom:

Soviet n. 2. A citizen of the U.S.S.R. Chiefly in pl. (hence loosely, = the Soviet Union or its leaders). [Courtesy of the OED]

with the first cited usage dating to 1920:

1920 Commercial & Financial Chron. 24 Jan. 288/1 He [sc. Clemenceau] insisted upon writing the final paragraph, ‘affirming that the Allies had not changed their attitude towards the Soviets’.
1930 Amer. Speech 6 121 (heading) Jailed Soviets go on hunger strike.
1959 Daily Tel. 7 Feb. 11/4 President Eisenhower, seeking one word to cover citizens of the Soviet Union, has braved the criticism of purists and adopted the term ‘Soviets’.

This concludes your daily lesson in American Idiom.

Re:Two words why I'll never buy a NYT subscription

[Koreantoast]

As the joke goes: people who think they should run the country read the NY Times; people who think they run the country read the Washington Post; and people who actually run the country read the Wall Street Journal.

Overpriced, by a long shot.

[Albert Schueller]

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.

Re:Overpriced, by a long shot.

[surgen]

At that price its cheaper for home delivery of the print edition 7 days a week.

why would I pay for news?

[Skarecrow77]

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?

Re:why would I pay for news?

[Trepidity]

I do find their articles higher quality on average than the sources you listed, though for basic news reporting the difference isn't large, and for in-depth analysis there are alternatives that seem like they won't be paywalled (at least for now), like The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Their strength imo is fairly timely, news-ish analysis (versus long-form essay), but with at least a medium amount of context/analysis and independent reporting that isn't purely cribbed from Reuters or the Associated Press.

Now whether that's interesting enough for anyone to pay for, I don't know. I won't be paying for it myself.

Re:why would I pay for news?

[Mazzie]

Its kind of like owning a luxury car. You still get from A to B, but you feel better than everyone else because you wasted your money.

Re:why would I pay for news?

[empiricistrob]

Why would you pay for news? Perhaps because you value journalism? Because high quality journalism is essential for a well functioning democracy? Because you don't want to read news where 50% of the headlines are about Lindsay Lohan or "human interest stories"?

Re:why would I pay for news?

[Attila Dimedici]

Why would you pay for news? Perhaps because you value journalism? Because high quality journalism is essential for a well functioning democracy?/quote> Of course, that still leaves the question as to why would you pay for the New York Times?

Re:why would I pay for news?

[cgenman]

While I agree all of that is valid, how is any of that related to the New York Times? There is a story about the dresses Lindsay Lohan wears to her court dates on the New York Times home page right now. There are also lots of fluffy pop stories like "Proud to be Japanese" and how to find a drink in Times Square.

The New York Times has had journalism problems since at least the mid 90's, and has been replaced in relevance by an ever increasing number of news sources. The US produces a great many things, but journalism is one area where the rest of the world has us beat.

Re:why would I pay for news?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

What has NYT got that I can't get elsewhere for free?

Paul Krugman.

Re:why would I pay for news?

[Koreantoast]

The fundamental problem is this: it costs money to generate good news coverage, particularly investigative reporting and overseas news operations. Professional journalism as a whole, but newsprint in particular, is hemorrhaging money because online advertising is simply not a sufficient replacement to traditional print and broadcast advertising. So you're left with a small set of choices. You can go the BBC route and take government money, but then that leaves you at the mercy of the government sponsor. You can go the route of people like CNN and Fox that curb real analysis and begin pandering to the lowest denominator, crowding out real news for celebrity gossip, the kidnapping of blond, white girls, and corporate statements. You can rely upon citizen journalists who do this stuff on a part time basis, but they're not going to have the resources or the weight to do the award-winning investigative journalism (Watergate, Walter Reed, etc.). There is of course raw data from sources ranging from Wikileaks to tweets by protestors, but raw data is extremely difficult and time consuming to work with and verify let alone even vet for accuracy (even the Wikileaks data was processed in the end by professional newsprint journalists). Maybe you can do the NPR non-profit model, but I don't know if that will support more than one or two news sources.

The "free" news we get right now is an unsustainable model that's only held in place because people are afraid to change by themselves, but if a new model doesn't emerge soon, then all of them will eventually collapse.

Expensive

[empiricistrob]

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.

RefControl

[_0xd0ad]

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.

Increased productivity

[coldsalmon]

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.

Re:Canada first? WTF?

[ThatsNotFunny]

Solution: Create more content and stop waiting for Americans to do all of the work.

Re:Browser Addons

[_0xd0ad]

We already do. It's called RefControl.

Because information has value

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Because information has value

[Kjella]

The thing was that when I grew up there was a selection of newspapers, and you picked one (or at most two). Investigative journalism was probably always a loss leader, you filled the rest up with cheap world news, local information that people more than willingly offer and got "free" money on stuff like announcing happenings or schedules, second hand market listings, obituaries and lots of other things that people wanted to put in the paper. You more or less had to have all the bits or people would pick a different newspaper.

Today, I can jump from one online site to the next on a story-by-story basis. Craigslist and eBay and lots of other companies will cherry-pick the lucrative bits and do pure sites based on that. World news? I can get those at the lowest bidder worldwide, being global and all. Before actually there was a value in getting a paper that'd tell you about the earthquake in Japan, today there 2342643 sites willing to tell you about it. So when you get everything else where it's cheapest, investigative journalism has to be its own profit center. The stories they make actually have to sell more than they cost to produce, there's no halo of additional income like there used to be.

That's tough. You see many magazines still do well because they cater to niches. Some financial newspapers still do good, because it's vital the information is fresh and analysis good. The other case is that the other newspapers aren't selling yesterday's news anymore. If an investigative journalist "blows the lid" on a case at 9 AM in one newspaper, by 10 AM all the others will have called someone for comment and made their own arguably legitimate news reporting and by the time it hits the evening news they'll pretty much all have an equally broad covering. So all you get is to work hard then throw it to the sharks who'll all grab their own piece while hopefully still sending a bit of the viewers to your own site. As a vital institution of society it's important, as a business model I'd run for the hills.

Re:Because information has value

[Unequivocal]

All good points. I wish they had introduced a fourth option, which could have been like how automatic toll payments work in the SF Bay Area (and probably elsewhere, dunno). I put in a "retainer" amount of some value (say $20). When that amount drops to below a certain value, the system automatically "tops" me back up to the max amount (the toll system is slightly more dynamic than this but you get the idea).

If I could put $20 in escrow with NY Times, I'd happily do so. Every time I read an article they could ding me $.25 or something. When I run out of article credits they top my account up by auto-charging again. I don't think many institutions could get me to subscribe in this way but NY Times is definitely one of them.

I think internet models are most profitable when they are monthly subscriptions but they lose a lot of customers who don't want a monthly fee for something they use irregularly. Amazon is basically taking those customers in the internet rental business - Netflix charges subs, and Amazon charges per rental. I wish NY Times had introduced a per rental model *in addition* to the ones they did announce, for people like me who like the service but don't use it regularly enough to justify a monthly sub.

Re:This sucks

[heathen_01]

Don't worry, trickle down economics will fix this problem for you.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:This sucks

[Maestro4k]

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.

Or just Google a bit to find a link to the article you want to read through a supported "search, blogs and social media" page that'll bypass the limit when you hit it. Shouldn't be a problem for current news, but will be an issue for historic articles. (Which I can understand charging for more than I can charging for everything.) This beats the hell out of what my local newspaper's done, they erected a paywall for everything. Even the most recent articles you can read a paragraph of and that's it, otherwise you have to have a print subscription to read them on their website. They're not the world's greatest newspaper, but I'm still hoping they crash and burn due to this. It was done in a really obnoxious manner. (Non-subscribers weren't even allowed to register to comment on the announcement that they were going to implement it. The message was loud and clear: "If you don't subscribe to the paper, we don't give a damn about you." Perhaps they should stop selling individual print copies as well, it would fit their current attitude.)

Price perspective

[mcguirez]

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.

4 weeks != month

[filmotheklown]

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'

Re:A fourth tier

[HornWumpus]

Democrats good, Republicans bad.

You can send my $2.50 a month to Japan red cross. Thank you very much.