As you may know, the New York Times is switching their website to a mostly *pay to read *format.
I’ve subscribed (for free) to their daily news summary for years & typically read 10-15 complete articles per day. That option is going/has gone away.
So, I’m looking for a replacement. The ideal would be a daily email containing leads from the main stories in each major department / news category with links to the full articles. Emphasis on world- & national- scale issues; I don’t much care abut local politics. And real professional writing; not some goofball’s blog.
This is for use on a PC & browser; smartphone apps don’t add value for me.
I know I could go to Google news & scan the headlines in each category, but I find that’s too real-time; there’s always a wad of me-too articles from 30 sources on whichever event happened in the last hour, and no sense of the whole day’s events.
I’m not a news junky and something like a RSS feed with 500 articles per day appearing in my RSS reader would be totally the wrong thing.
Nor do I want something with a decided political slant or topic filter.
Suggestions??
But… How do you expect “real professional writers” to be funded, and actual reporters dispatched to remote areas of the world, without being paid for? Do you really want them funded entirely by advertisers (who have things to hawk or angles to push), instead of paid subscribers like you who want objectivity rather than slanting or filtering (assuming you find that the NYT fulfills those parameters for you)?
Isn’t a world of free “newspapers” essentially a world of differently scaled blogs?
Personally, as a very long-time reader of the NY Times, I am curious (and not optimistic) to see whether the quality of the writing and coverage will improve with a return to a paid subscription model. Since they went mostly “free and online”, they have increasingly resembled, well, any other news outlet or blog. I’ll gladly pay the same adjusted cost (actually less) than what I used to pay 10 years ago when I still subscribed to the daily physical paper, until I realized it was just so much recycling material given that I could read the same stuff on my computer and now on my iPhone.
I’m not optimistic because a generation of people now exist who consider this normal and won’t pay for dedicated reporters who are “Special to the NY Times”, and because the 24-hour ability to instantly publish on the Internet (never mind using Twitter) to “break” news (and the need to seem at the forefront of the breaking) has forever eliminated the pre-publishing window of proofing, editing and fact-checking material before they “hit the presses”.
I go to http://www.reuters.com/ for news. Pretty much straight reporting of facts and even the opinion pieces tend to avoid the sensationalism that passes for news these days.
I just checked and Google News Advanced Search for New York Times still works. There was some speculation that they might try to stop this. Then some conjecture that they would not try and stop it anytime soon. But, as of a couple of minutes ago it was still working.
If I understand it right, you can still read 25 articles a month plus anything from the Top News section without subscribing. If you’re reading more than that, you’ll have to pay a subscription fee, and as robardin points that’s probably fair, as anachronistic as it may feel.
One can watch 20 articles a month and thereafter 5 articles a day. The 5 per day is accessed by pasting the headline from nytimes.com into a search engine. The last story was that NYT did not want to discourage search engine traffic too much.