NY Times Passes 1M Digital Subscribers

HughPickens.com writes: Many news organizations, facing competition from digital outlets, have sharply reduced the size of their newsrooms and their investment in news gathering but less than four-and-a-half years after launching its pay model the NY Times has increased coverage as it announced that the Times has passed one million digital-only subscribers, giving them far more than any other news organization in the world. The Times still employs as many reporters as it did 15 years ago — and its ranks now include graphics editors, developers, video journalists and other digital innovators. "It's a tribute to the hard work and innovation of our marketing, product and technology teams and the continued excellence of our journalism," says CEO Mark Thompson.

According to Ken Doctor the takeaway from the Times success is that readers reward elite global journalism. The Wall Street Journal is close behind the Times, at 900,000, while the FT's digital subscription number stands at 520,000. "These solid numbers form bedrock for the future. For news companies, being national now means being global, and being global means enjoying unprecedented reach," says Doctor. "These audiences of a half-million and more portend more reader revenue to come."

Comments

Overblown

[opusbuddy]

I am one of one million, and a long-time reader of NY Times. Frankly, I think this is a little over blown and I sure hope they don't hurt themselves patting themselves on the back. I read the NYT mobile edition daily, enabled by my subscription to the Sunday paper home delivery. The Business and Technology sections have the same content listed for weeks on end. They suffered greatly when David Pogue left. Much of the "paid" subscription content is just blog postings. Better than most blogs, written by intelligent journalists, but blog postings none-the-less.

And about once a week (at least), you get a nasty full screen popover. Their recent coverage about the cost/benefit of ad blocking shows their pages are heavy, which gets annoying and uses bandwidth if you don't hit reader view really fast or use an ad blocker.

I love the New York Times, but have never been happy with their IT department. Will never, ever, ever use the mobile app they keep trying to get me to download. Burned too many times on that one.

Secret Weapon: The Times Crossword

[jomama717]

Whoever they have over there that is responsible for designing and implementing their online crossword page/apps is a genius. If you told me 10 years ago that I would enjoy doing crosswords on a cell phone I would have laughed, but they pulled it off. It's the only reason I subscribe - and the actual news/opinion is a very nice add-on feature :)

Re:One of the last real news outlets remaining

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

with the only real "news" being the USA Today insert.

USAToday is the "Egg McMuffin" of newspapers: it looks way better than it tastes.

Seriously, If there's any actual news printed in USAToday, I sure as never never found it.

Wow what an ahole

[goombah99]

Just because you can sneak into the theater doesn't mean you should. Sure if you need a quick peak inside the tent I would imagine NY times is happy to have you interested in their added value news products. They do have a fairly reasonable policy of 10 free articles per month. And in doing that they leave themselves open to the work around you suggest. Would you recommend they discontinue that nice porous paywall because of cretons like you? The good news for them is you are not really their customer and you still get to see their advertisements while you gloat over your cleverness.