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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."
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."
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.
If this were easy, they wouldn't need us to do it!
I'm an NY Times digital subscriber, for two reasons. First, subscription costs are dirt cheap for people in academia. Second, the NY Times is one of the few remaining news services in the USA that practices investigative journalism any more. I may not always agree with the NY Times' "slant" on a particular story, but at least there is some real content to what they publish.
Our local newspaper is your typical Gannett mess, with the only real "news" being the USA Today insert. The local news is little more than thinly-disguised opinion pieces, local crime reports with minimal information, and articles that rightfully belong on a Gawker site or in People magazine. My wife and I dropped our remaining weekend subscription to the local paper months ago, and we haven't missed it since.
Good for them, they've adapted, changed, and are pulling ahead. I remember when the pay-wall decision was made, they were one of the first to do it and it was an incredibly controversial and risky proposition "why would someone pay when Google News is free?". Everyone was very nervous and there were lots of naysayers but looks like they're figuring it out. Hats off and rock on.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
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 :)
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
IMO, if you trust any of the old media enough to pay for a subscription, and you spend enough time on one website to get your money's worth, you're probably getting too much of your information from a single source.
Perhaps a subset of that million just believes in "paying it back" to the journalistic institutions of their communities. Just saying. Full disclosure: I'm not a subscriber to any digital publication.
I suspect it's more like supporting their own view of the world. People who subscribe to NYT or WSJ want news with the editorial spin from those sources to be widely distributed. Same with people who donate to and support congressional funding for NPR.
You should pay for some sort of news outlet. New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, I don't care which: you need to make sure that the place you're getting your information from is beholden to its readers, not just to its advertisers and owners. You know the old saying: if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product.
They also put NYT's 1,000,000 subscribers into perspective, BBC News Online gets 40 million unique users a week.
or mangle the url
when i get back a nytimes.com page that is paywalled i go to the url and i
1. chop off the nytimes.com domain upfront
2. chop off the trailing querystring
3. hit enter, you get a google result, the first link always being the story you want
4. follow that link
the referer is now sanitized
so you get the article. you even stay logged in
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Of course. I don't much listen to Rush Limbaugh because he never says anything remotely sensible. We all pick and choose. The NYT has a distinct and disturbing liberal bias at times but they do manage to actually create news by good reporting. That's rather rare these days.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
But how many of those sources are actually doing investigative journalism? I'd take one source that has the resources to do real investigation over ten that can barely afford to regurgitate press releases and rely on sponsored articles for their income.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Or who don't mind paying $3/week for unlimited access and to support quality journalism..
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
And, unfortunately for NYT, the benefit from being a subscriber are pretty slim. Same annoying, intrusive adds. Same klunk of an interface. Same annoying emails. Most (but certainly not all) sites that have a subscription either drop adverts or markedly tone them down. The NYT team seems a bit clueless.
Adverts for subscribers are way less than non-subscribers, and are basically the ideal static well behaved ads that we want to encourage. More emails, but they are news summaries and alerts and you can opt out. I think nyt does the subscription model pretty well. Source: personal experience.