New York Times Ends Its Paid Subscription Service

Mike writes "The New York Times has announced that it will end its paid Internet service in favor of making most of its Web site available for free. The hope is that this move will attract more readers and higher advertising revenue. 'The longer-term problem for publishers like the Times is that they must find ways to present content online rather than just transferring stories and pictures from the newspaper. Most U.S. news Web sites offer their contents for free, supporting themselves by selling advertising. One exception is The Wall Street Journal which runs a subscription-based Web site. TimesSelect generated about $10 million in revenue a year. Schiller declined to project how much higher the online growth rate would be without charging visitors.'"

Hope they open the archives

[Raul654]

If they opened up the archives, their website would instantly become *A LOT* more useful.

Too late the damage has already been done

[imaginaryelf]

Putting your most influential op-ed writers behind a pay wall is a sure way to make their voices irrelevant in the Internet age.

Re:Hope they open the archives

[PCM2]

If they opened up the archives, their website would instantly become *A LOT* more useful.

There are such things as libraries, though. The San Francisco Public Library, for one, offers access to a complete online newspaper archive that includes the New York Times in addition to many other papers. The deal is, you have to punch in your library card number to access it. After that, though, you can read, save, and print all those articles that the Times purportedly keeps under lock and key.

The fact that most people don't even know this makes me fearful for the future of libraries.

Re:Hope they open the archives

[clickety6]

The fact that most people don't even know this makes me fearful for the future of libraries.

Of course, the fact that most internet users don't live in the US and so can't walk into a a US Public Library to access the New York Times archives may also help make the online archive useful ;-)

Worthy of Turning Off My Adblocker

[LotTS]

I do not believe all information on the internet is supposed to be free (in terms of price). Wayyy back in the 90's before the internet was mainstream I had a paid subscription to NY Times, even though they were 2-3 times more expensive than my local paper, because I felt the quality was so much greater and was willing to pay for that quality. The newspaper still had ads from revenue back then, but I still had to pay for it and was willing to do so.

Fast forward to today and I still believe that - the news quality of a NY Times piece is still premium quality, but the difference now is that the news is 100% paid for by advertisers. My conscience is making me turn off my browser's adblocker plugin when I go to NY Times's website now.

Newspapers had an advertising model for umpteen ye

[simplerThanPossible]

Then along comes the internet and they say "subscription model!"

scratches head

From article:
The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge

Re:OK, but its nice to have the option

[TubeSteak]

Personally I like to have the option to pay for no ads.

Doing that may or may not be a good idea for an ad-driven business like the NY Times.

On the one hand, they might make more money.
On the other... they would have less eyeballs to offer their advertisers, which means less money.

If there isn't a big difference in profit, it's usually better to think long-term & keep your big advertising partners happy. You'll ultimately make more money that way.

From NY to London, how I missed the Op-Ed Page!

[QuatermassX]

I left America several years ago to live in London and one of the few things I miss was the straight to the point of dull news from the New York Times and their thought-provoking columnists. Putting a third of the paper - and the most unique elements of the paper - behind a paid wall seemed to be a one-way ticket to irrelevance. I can read wire stories for free anywhere, but the editorial and op-ed pages really do influence the American national discourse - keep them open-access for all to read, discuss (or completely dismiss and ignore).

Um...why?

[argStyopa]

"The longer-term problem for publishers like the Times is that they must find ways to present content online rather than just transferring stories and pictures from the newspaper."

Why?

For chrissakes, no matter what you think of the paper as a journalistic entity, nor what you think of its editorial decisions, nor what you think of its columnists, it really is the newspaper of record for the United States.

They have an extraordinary breadth of content. Why can't they just "copy stories and pictures from the newspaper"? If anyone in the media business would be able to generate bulk traffic (read: advertising $$) from sheer content without any particular bells and whistles, it would be the website that simply mirrors the staggering amount of content from the NYT.

Add to that a searchable archive of the NYT going back to the beginning, and I frankly can't think of a single media outlet in the world that could match it for comprehensive historical information on daily events pertinent to the United States.

Huge content, daily updates, impeccable credentials - yeah, who'd imagine THAT could draw significant pageviews?

Re:Hope they open the archives

[PopeRatzo]

You should fear for the future of public libraries. Their very existence flies in the face of our entire system of intellectual property. If it weren't for the fact that public libraries are venerable institutions to which we have become accustomed, the RIAA, MPAA, publishing companies, and the entire IP-Industrial complex would have killed them off long ago.

As it is, they are a lovely working example of the power and value of the collective and proof that government can work. Republicans hate libraries.

I love libraries with all my heart and soul. I live near the wonderful Harold Washington Library and I still get happy inside by just walking through their doors. Libraries are living laboratories of socialism in the belly of the profit-driven beast.

God bless libraries.

Re:If you're against the war this is very bad news

[mh1997]

It means that more people will read their insidious shit. They ridiculed all of us who challenged the 2004 election results. They've been championing the war on Iraq since before its inception. They're cheerleading right now for war on Iran.

And don't even get me started on their coverage of the war on drugs.

But here you all are, celebrating the fact that your generation's Goebbels is about to become even more destructive than it was before.

Funny that the Fox types constantly trot out the NYT as an example of left-wing bias in the media...

The NYT does have a left-wing bias, and there is nothing wrong with that. Fox News commentary is right-wing, and again nothing wrong with that. The problem is that they both claim they don't have a bias and people that have the same bias typically cannot see that their media outlet of choice has a bias. If you want to be truly informed, you will get your news from both the right and the left, compare the merits of any differences (including stories they choose to cover and those they choose not to cover), and make up your own mind based on rational thought.

That being said, I don't think the original poster is right wing, he is complaining about the positive coverage of the war in Iraq, the positive coverage for a war with Iran and he refers to Goebbels.

Re:If you're against the war this is very bad news

[nokilli]

I'd agree that The New York Times tries to appear to be left wing, and on inconsequential matters it may succeed, but mongering for war the last time I checked was definitely not a liberal persuasion.

It isn't just the constant news coverage citing "unnamed sources" in an effort to implicate this or that group of Muslims in various imagined transgressions, even after they promised to swear off using unnamed sources, it's deciding to wait until after the 2004 election to tell us about Bush's illegal wiretapping, or not telling us about the 9-11 Commission Report citing American support for Israeli atrocities against Palestinians as the reason for the attack, or continually over-reporting acts of violence committed by Muslims against Jews while under-reporting acts of violence committed by Jews against Muslims (did you know that Israelis have killed nearly four times as many Muslims as vice versa? My point exactly.)

When you put it all together -- and by no means is the above a comprehensive list of their transgressions -- a picture emerges of a paper driven by racism and allegiance to Israel above all things, including America.

Everybody goes on about the corporate media when talking about media support for this war, well, here's some news: The New York Times is by far the worst offender in this regard, and it isn't corporate-owned at all! It's a family paper.

Ad Block them. Starve the war machine. Kill the propaganda machine before it succeeds in killing us.

Re:Hope they open the archives

[saforrest]

(though one wonders if you were so well read, how would you become a socialist...)

Orwell was pretty well read too, and he was a socialist to his dying day.

Re:Hope they open the archives

[RESPAWN]

There are such things as libraries, though. The San Francisco Public Library, for one, offers access to a complete online newspaper archive that includes the New York Times in addition to many other papers. The deal is, you have to punch in your library card number to access it. After that, though, you can read, save, and print all those articles that the Times purportedly keeps under lock and key.

The fact that most people don't even know this makes me fearful for the future of libraries.

There are also such things as underfunded back-woods county libraries that don't offer this level of access. Yeah, I know. My fault for living where I do, but the rent's cheap. The point is: by opening up their archives to the internet their content can be accessed by a MUCH larger audience than before. Not everybody lives in large US metropolitan areas with properly funded libraries.

Some of us live in the next county where the funding just plain sucks.

Re:If you're against the war this is very bad news

[jdfox]

Only in the USA, where centrism and moderate liberalism are routinely labelled "left-wing", could the New York Times be considered "left-wing". It suits the interests of the corporate media and the political goals of right-wing commentators to re-define terms of political alignment in this way.

The New York Times is indeed right-wing, and Fox News even more so. There are no mainstream left-wing newspapers in the USA anymore.

Re:Worthy of Turning Off My Adblocker

[solferino]

Why not go all the way and just arrange for a lobotomy operation?

Re:Um...why?

[BigDumbAnimal]

Huge content, daily updates, impeccable credentials - yeah, who'd imagine THAT could draw significant pageviews?

I can't wait to ready all that high quality work from Jayson Blair.

Re:Political spectra have arbitrary zeroes.

[drsquare]

If the NYT is left, what exactly are their left-wing policies? They support wars in the middle east, they support Israeli violence, they're huge Bush supporters, what exactly do they say that could be considered left wing by anyone other than Mussolini?

Re:Hope they open the archives

[the_lesser_gatsby]

George Orwell was a complex man who frequently criticized his own views. In general he was a democratic socialist. Animal Farm and 1984 are more against totalitarianism than socialism.