NY Times To Charge For Online Content 488
Hugh Pickens writes "New York Magazine reports that the NY Times appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of debate inside the paper, the choice has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system. The decision to go paid is monumental for the Times, and culminates a yearlong debate that grew contentious, people close to the talks say. Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times' last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year's financial crisis, the argument that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper's high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight."
Re:Why should people pay them? (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, that's all before we even consider the IT infrastructure that they need, from servers to bandwidth to admins, to ensure that they can handle the amount of traffic that they get -- which is coming there because of the quality of the information that they provide.
Maybe the other media outlets which are free have comparable quality, maybe not. Most of the free news outlets, especially those which are purely an on-line thing, don't really go out of their way to hide bias or to be objective. We all know the editorial page slant of NYT, but they seem to do a reasonable job of remaining objective in the actual stories from what I've seen.
Not to rehash the old "you get what you pay for" argument that people always try to knock down around here, but a lot of the time that really is the case. Nothing in life is free -- someone is always paying, somehow. Advertisers aren't paying enough, so the people who want the content should be asked to support the infrastructure necessary to ensure that they continue to get what they want.
Re:Free-Market Principle: Quality commands a price (Score:4, Informative)
The NYT will also succeed at charging for its content.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they already try this and find it a dismal failure? I seem to remember I stopped reading any of their articles some years ago when they began some stupid restrictions on access.
Re:Good Bye, New York Times (Score:1, Informative)
Kevin Mitnick begs to differ.
You need to get over Kevin Mitnick. The charges were overblown, but you have to understand the way people view people who go poking around in their things. Here's an illustrative story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkkMujudDVA [youtube.com]
Kevin Mitnick's defense is essentially "I just thought it might feel nice to stick my dick in those holes and I didn't think it would hurt anybody."
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Informative)
Hmmm... but they would all need to do it. And there's nowhere near the level of consolidation in global news sources that there is in airlines. That's going to make it a lot harder to get a cartel together. On top of that, the last few holdouts stand to see some serious traffic, with corresponding potentials for ad revenue. That's not to say it couldn't happen, but I think it would be a lot harder to bring it about.
There are other important differences, as well. If I want a flight from Newcastle to London in the UK, and all the flights are overloaded with surcharges, I can't easily substitute one from, say, Seattle to San Diego. With online news services, I can, at least for stories with more or less global scope, or ones specific to an industry.
And of course, it's a lot harder to get together with about a thousand other travellers and start offering my own flights, which is not the case for online news. Granted, the blogging community are unlikely to finance a reporter who wants to infiltrate the Taliban, at least not any time soon. On the other hand, they probably can supply enough news of good enough standard that very few people will see much of value behind the paywalls. Bloggers, I think, fit the classic disruptive innovation pattern.
Like I say, none of that necessarily means the scenario you describe will not happen. But I don't think it's anywhere near as likely as you make it sound.
Re:The Times has its reasons for doing this... (Score:1, Informative)
The New York Times was WRONG on the war and WRONG on the housing bubble. The two biggest issues of our day. Don't tell me New York Times provides some big "value" to democracy as a watchdog. Please, that's just insulting.
Re:How to do this right? (Score:3, Informative)
so, what newspaper do you work for?
I've worked for the San Francisco Chronicle in the past but most of my work has appeared in tech trade publications, most particularly InfoWorld, where I spent several years as a senior editor. It's not like I make any secret about it.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:2, Informative)
I'll bite. I once had a friend who attended the Northeastern University School of Journalism [northeastern.edu] and not only could she not tell the difference between "news" and "opinion" but could not understand why dividing the two is important. Her thought was people are inherently biased and so a good journalist, rather than elevating stories above one's bias, should tell the story the way one sees and feels it.
Facts seem to be secondary to most outlets these days, regardless of their political leanings.
Re:Good Bye, New York Times (Score:3, Informative)
You were significantly less full of crap than other newspapers.
I take this to mean that you've never read the NYT then. Even as bad as Fox News is for promoting Republicans, the NYT is WAY worse at promoting Democrats.
Re:What are they doing to cut costs? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sure doing business in NYC ain't cheap - do they really need an entire building in midtown Manhattan?
The New York Times management has made mistakes, but they aren't complete dummies. They don't actually have an entire building [guardian.co.uk] in midtown Manhattan anymore. But as far as being a "global newspaper of record," being based in what some have called the "capital city of the world" isn't a bad idea.
Re:How to do this right? (Score:3, Informative)
mrphoton says he'll read www.bbc.co.uk instead. That's all well and good, but the BBC is supported by British taxes, while the New York Times is a private newspaper. There's a strong tradition of separation of media and government in the U.S. and it isn't likely to ever change.
You seem to be missing the point that the BBC often has better coverage of U.S. news than U.S. newspapers (specifically including the NYT) and by better I mean less chock-full of bullshit and sensationalism. Not that those things aren't in plenty of evidence over at the beeb — they certainly are. The LA Times is twice the paper the NYT ever was, and it blows too.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:3, Informative)
There are many, many examples, but here's a personal favorite: back in 2002/2003, the Times ran 95 stories in nine months [blogspot.com] on the supposedly big controversy involving the Augusta National Golf Club, which didn't admit women as members. When the time came for the big demonstration against the club, about 40 people showed up. I humbly suggest that so many stories about such a minor controversy is good evidence of a political agenda driving news coverage.
As for ignoring stories that don't fit their biases, readers of the Times were probably surprised when Van Jones resigned, because until then there hadn't been any coverage of the controversy.
Re:The Times has its reasons for doing this... (Score:4, Informative)
Name an important piece of investigative journalism done by the Times in the last ten years. I can't. And I'm a regular reader. It's increasingly a "lifestyle" paper. It sees its crucial missions as propping up the real estate market in NYC (with fascinating articles like the one suggesting that since banks aren't lending, maybe you young people can borrow the half-million for a starter apartment from your folks), and pretending to be liberal while propping up most of the neocon fantasies about an American new world order (even before cheerleading Iraq, it was responsible for the absurd Whitewater charges).
I like half their editorial columnists. They have a couple of good economic writers. And I'm entertained by the lifestyle and real estate fluff. Plus at least their front page is by their own writers rather than the AP - which continues a rapid descent in quality too. And some of their NYC coverage is unavailable elsewhere - although only of interest to people with lives or roots in the city.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Informative)
Quite right. There is an excellent Book called Flat Earth News on how news is collected/created these days.
For another angle on the issue, read "Manufacturing Consent" by Herman and Chomsky. There is also a documentary on youtube.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Informative)
FiveThirtyEight [fivethirtyeight.com] provides fantastic political coverage, largely based upon statistical analyses. Although the site became a bit more editorialized after the 2008 election, Nate Silver acknowledges his biases up front, and almost always provides rock-solid data to back them up. He's also been responsible for bringing down a few fraudulent pollsters.
Speaking of political commentary, Andrew Sullivan [theatlantic.com] is certainly an interesting beast. His tangents about Sarah Palin are a bit silly, although his general political commentary tends to be spot-on.
Bad Astronomy [discovermagazine.com] is an all-around fantastic science blog.
Jason Kottke's blog [kottke.org] has very little original content, although his content selections are impeccable, reminding me of what Slashdot used to be. He's good at his job in the same way that NPR is good at what it does.
There are more excellent music blogs than I can even possibly begin to enumerate. These have helped launch a mini revolution in the music industry. Although mainstream pop is still the same recycled garbage as it always was, the alternative music community is thriving, and occasionally some of the good stuff does trickle up into the mainstream.
BLDGBLOG [blogspot.com] is a great read for armchair architects. Infrastructurist [infrastructurist.com] is a great read for armchair civil engineers.
FlowingData [flowingdata.com] is a fascinating read about data visualization.
Want to look good at work? Read this [putthison.com].
I'm sure I'm forgetting a few good ones. Google solicited the reading lists [google.com] of a few experts. Their recommendations are generally quite good.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Informative)
CRU being hacked and proven to provide false data, never reported by NYT.
Because the stolen e-mails proved no such thing. But since you request: Hacked E-Mail Data Prompts Calls for Changes in Climate Research [nytimes.com]
Rush Limbaugh being misquoted and slandered, never reported by NYT.
Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. His opinions are not news. Similarly, if I call Rush a doodie-head that's not news, and if some other media organization misquotes Rush it's not news. But since you asked, here [nytimes.com] is the New York Times topic page for Rush Limbaugh. Find me where he was misquoted and slandered by the Times and you may be onto something.
The list is COUNTLESS
You've almost counted to one so far. You're doing well, don't stop now.
you just don't know about it because you are too ignorant to look up more than one source of news
Based on your own preferred source of news entertainment, I'd reckon the list of my sources of news would be beyond your comprehension.