The NYT is doing this in hopes of stemming the tide of cancellations for their paper service. A high paper circulation rate is important because it brings in higher advertising dollars and it bolsters the Time’s claim to be a major, important service. The hit to the circulation numbers is ultimately a far bigger problem for them than losing the fairly trivial subscription fees. Therefore, this plan is less about generating revenue from the website than it is about disincentivizing people from canceling their paper subscription.
I probably will pay for it because I’m too lazy to pick up a magazine and I love their Health News section.
I have a home delivery subscription on California, and it is a hell of a lot more than that. But it is necessary to know what is going on in depth. Even when the local rag carries stuff from the Times news service, they cut it off right in the middle. So I think this is a move to monetize the national readership more than to get money out of the local readership. They are doing a few special pages for the Bay Area as they try to go national. So, I’m all for it, since it costs a lot of money to keep that many reporters out in the field, and because it means less of my money subsidizes freeloaders.
That doesn’t mean I think it will work, but it is worth a shot.
I’m okay with this, as they announced well ahead of time that they were going to do this. I didn’t check if it was retroactive, as I hate that, but, again, anyone who actually cared about that knew about it ahead of time.
What pisses me off is when a website I’ve been using for a long time suddenly requires payment, and does so retroactively so you can’t watch something you planned to watch in your free time (like a long video). This is why I pitted Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show, for example.
As for my opinion of the service: Meh. I’ve rarely used it. BBC and the random AP story from elsewhere is sufficient for me, usually.
Crap:
I guess I’ll have to change my online news-reading habits, skipping the Times when it comes to simple, straightforward news stories that can be ably covered by AP or (shudder) the Washington Post. Or … nope, the Wall Street Journal is already behind a (cheaper) pay wall.
They definitely priced me right out of their market – I’d be willing to throw them $25-$35 for the year no problem, and possibly a little more, but $195 a year just isn’t happening. Oh well. Also, I don’t know what the hell they’re on about with charging extra for an iPhone app, since the standard website reads just fine on my phone (loads quickly, columns are appropriately sized, etc.).
(Where the hell does this thread go? Here? MPSIMS?)
I’ll just merge it into the existing thread.
I’ll get it free. That’s because I subscribe to the print paper because it’s the last source of actual news.
I’m at the computer all day long. I read a million things on it. But the compilation of intelligently edited news and feature articles into a compact source that doesn’t have to be read on a screen is an absolute treasure.
Is it worth paying for the Times online? My advice would be to subscribe to the print edition and use the computer version only if you happen to be away from your home. Nobody’s going to do that, of course. So it comes down to whether the online edition will still be worth paying for when the print edition folds because not enough people subscribe. And that answer is probably no because they’ll have to lay off three-quarters of their staff and the depth and breadth of their staff is what makes it worth paying for.
Man, that’s depressing.
I wonder how they plan to track how many articles one has read? If it’s just a browser cookie, what’s to prevent someone from using multiple browsers, or just deleting the cookie? Or will there be some kind of login required, even to view the free articles?
I’m a bit confused about your position here. In your OP, it seems as if your thesis is that having an online system you have to pay for is, in and of itself, a mistake. That you won’t pay for it and them trying this shows how “anachronistic and out-of-touch they are.”
But in the second, what you seem to be saying is that the concept of pay-to-read isn’t really the problem. It’s just that you don’t see the NYT as worth the investment.
Which is it?
No no no. They’re anachronistic and out of touch as an editorial matter (IMHO). “Crime Falls Though Prison Population Rises,” and their eight-months-late-to-the-party front pager on the numa numa kid come to mind . . . .
Other than suspecting that for them, the business model may not work out, nothing in my post should have been taken to suggest that I have a problem with free enterprise, pay-to-view websites, etc., and the second viewpoint you posit (go for it, but I won’t find it worth the dime) is my only point.
I would be curious (maybe I will do a GQ) how many websites are making a go of getting substantial numbers of people to pay more than a trivial amount (SDMB being a trivial amount) for content.
Look guys, I know some people love the New York Times. And that the New York Times has a right to propose any business model they like, and if we don’t like it we can go elsewhere. But that’s the point. I am morally certain that this business model will not succeed. And that means the New York Times will fail, and all you guys who love the New York Times will be heartbroken.
I’m not predicting it will fail because I WANT it to fail, I’m predicting it will fail because I think that is the most likely outcome. I don’t tell cancer patients not to take laetrile because I love cancer and want them to die, I tell them not to take laetrile because it won’t work.
It may be that newspapers and journalism depend on charging people subscriptions, and if people won’t pay for journalism journalism will die. But what that means isn’t that charging people for subscriptions will work, it means journalism will die. If the only hope for little Timmy is that Santa Claus brings him the medicine he needs on Christmas morning, that doesn’t make Santa real.
That’s fair and well-reasoned. You could even go a step further and say that if journalism dies, then democracy will die soon after. I won’t argue that you’re wrong, but I hope that you are. Meanwhile, I’ll be paying the subscription fee.
Right, but if you think journalism is necessary for democracy, setting up a paywall that excludes 99% of the country isn’t exactly going to help. What you want then are supporters like yourself who subsidize the paper, and allow it to be available for free to everyone else who isn’t as public-spirited. This is the NPR model, and NPR is getting more listeners even as newspaper readers and cable news watchers are going off a cliff.
If the existence of the New York Times is a public good, then putting it behind a paywall is a disaster because the vast majority of the public won’t pay. At least their current model allows people unlimited access to stories they reach via links. But what that means is that most people aren’t going to read the New York Times website every morning, they’ll read Andrew Sullivan or Huffpost or Drudge, and only read the stories that Andrew links to. This puts the bloggers and linkfarmers at the center of the new mediasphere, and journalists at the periphery. And if most of your traffic is from links via Drudge, and you don’t charge those people, then you don’t get any money from them anyway! It’s insanity.
If you think journalism is a public good, then you should support journalists, not by paying for content that only you can see, but by subsidizing them to produce content that everyone can see.
If this works at the NY Times, then I bet a lot of other news sites will follow. 
Murdoch has mentioned several times he’s interested in pay sites. He owns WSJ, Fox and several others.
Me?? I’ll get my news from tv. I already pay for the privilege of getting cnn, fox, msnbc. Even my local news comes in through DirecTV. Almost 100 bucks a month for 2 receivers and basic service. The web can piss up a rope. I ain’t paying twice. :mad:
Lemur866, that was a very interesting and insightful post.
I think you are spot on. I’ve given money to the radio station because I appreciate them, I think they do a valuable public service, and I am pleased to subsidize listeners who might not have enough money to give (as I was when I first started listening to them). But if they started charging me for listening, I’d probably just stop listening. It’s a weird psychology thing!
How do you do the crossword online?
TV is the worst place to get news, IMO. They have time to cover maybe six stories at decent length in a half hour. With a newspaper I can read maybe twenty stories in that same time, plus see the headlines of about fifty more, so I get a much more complete picture of the day’s news. I can read a lot faster than TV anchors can speak.
Many newspapers, the NYT among them, have a special web version of the crossword puzzle. You use the arrow keys to scroll around the puzzle, then type the letters into the boxes.
Frankly, I think the newspaper model is anachronistic and it’s only a matter of time before it dies off completely.
I would dispute that the New York Times or any other mainstream media source represents ‘high quality’ journalism vs the ‘low quality’ of web journalism. It’s a different model, and uses different techniques:
Newspapers essentially act as content aggregaters and filters - they commission pieces from authors or buy news from the AP or other sources, then they put it together in coherent fashion. Their editors protect the public from false or misleading information (or they should, anyway). The result is a ‘trusted’ source of news, collected together and organized for easy reading. They also do original reporting, but they’re increasingly cutting back on that and in my opinion their error rate is no better than what you’d find on the web anyway if you look in the right places.
That’s the old model for journalism. The web is almost about disintermediation and the removal of traditional gatekeepers standing between the audience and the content creators. That includes newspapers, record companies, magazines, and traditional print publishers.
In the new model, everyone is a journalist. That means there’s a lot of crap you can point to and say, “See? The web has no quality standards! It’s inferior!” But in fact the web also has an editorial process. It’s just that in this case it’s carried out in the open in transparent fashion. Content aggregators like the HuffingtonPost or InstaPundit bring value by collecting the stuff they think is the most interesting, the most accurate, or the most valuable. In turn, their audiences rise and fall based on how well they do.
In the meantime, crowd-sourced news is becoming much better than what the old news media is doing. Take the revolution in Egypt - you could go on the web and find all kinds of direct sources describing exactly what was going on. You could find experts filtering all the crowd-sourced information and providing the big picture. But if you turned to CNN, what did you get? A meta-story about how CNN journalists were being treated by the crowds.
Last year we had a windstorm in my city which was causing all sorts of havoc. I followed it on twitter, getting direct updates from various parts of the city. I was also watching the ‘breaking news’ on TV, which was horribly wrong. They only had a few reporters out, and were giving an incomplete picture of what was happening. In one case, they reported that a building had collapsed, which caused an instant stream of twitter comments that no such thing had happened. It took hours before the old media caught up and corrected itself, by which time the storm was over.
Independent web journalists like Michael Yon are doing war correspondence that’s far better than anything you’re likely to see in the big newspapers these days - especially since many of them have cut their own throats by cutting back on actual news gathering and foreign bureaus in response to shrinking revenue - thereby damaging the only thing that actually did separate them from web commentary.
Finally, programs like Flipboard on the iPad allow you to create your own aggregation of news. You don’t need a newspaper any more. Just get flipboard and configure it to pull stories from the web aggregators you trust, and it will arrange it into a nice, newspaper-like format.
I think the NY times is doomed. It may stick around as a brand, but over time it will shrink until it’s just another web operation like the Huffington Post or Brietbart.com.
Sam, I get what you’re saying. I don’t disagree with your specifics at all. My disagreement is with something larger. Or perhaps what my personal wants are comprise something larger.
I don’t disagree that if you want instantaneous local information, then a variety of online content will better serve that. You may also find specific information on specific subjects of national or international that is far better. As I said, I’m on my computer all day and I do a lot of this.
I’ve seen the difference put as saying that the old model was horizontal and the new model is vertical. A newspaper, a magazine, the tv news, are all horizontal. They take slices out of many different areas, interests, and expectations and package them in one presumably professional whole.
The web can take any individual area and provide enormous depth. Cars or flowers or breastfeeding or lactose intolerance. You can find blogs and websites and message boards and twitter groups and anything else you can think of. No newspaper could possibly give that level of coverage. Online is vertical and bottomless.
The web is poorer at horizontal, though. The Huffington Post is horizontal. The Drudge Report is horizontal. Wikipedia is horizontal. The Dope is horizontal. They all have many virtues and many flaws. They’re not equivalent to journalism as we’ve known it.
I agree that newspapers are doomed. I’m not yet convinced that journalism is doomed, although I admit I haven’t seen a new model for it that I believe in. But journalism was a very good thing, too good a thing to give up easily. What you describe doesn’t work for me as a replacement. It’s an infant, though, and may yet grow up. Journalism took a long time to become something good itself. There is a power that institutions have to get things done that individuals don’t. That’s what the web currently lacks. Crowds must be organized. You may think they self-organize, but Wikipedia, for all its usefulness, is the prime example of what you lose without a higher organizer. You may think that the new always pushes out the old, but as in evolution itself, inertia in technology often keeps the functional over the better unless a crisis occurs.