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."
Oh well (Score:5, Interesting)
NY Times To Charge For Online Content (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh well, no big deal to me. By the time I found something on NYT that I was interested in reading, it was already in their paid section and no longer free to view.
I wonder if the printer versions and such will also be "paid only" or if that little loophole will remain unfixed.
Why should people pay them? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, if they now will be behind a paywall, while other media are free, how are they going to convince us about their objectivity? Or why should people pay them?
Free-Market Principle: Quality commands a price. (Score:3, Interesting)
The "New York Times" (NYT) also publishes content that is quite good (but is not as good as the content from the WSJ). The NYT will also succeed at charging for its content.
The good things in life are not free. Reporters, columnists, and editors work hard day and night to produce the high-quality content at the WSJ and the NYT. We Slashdotters should not expect that they work for free. Certainly, most Slashdotters will not work for free.
On a side note, a newspaper like the "Sacramento Bee" will not succeed at charging for content. It is mediocre and is not worth any price.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Interesting)
I would imagine it's easier for the to keep it as is and if everyone else does a pay wall then that's just more business they'll get looking at their ads on the international versions.
Re:Oh well (Score:2, Interesting)
You are wrong. No one has to pay for the content; there's too much of it already.
It is nonviable for producers to keep pushing crap at loss, but the end result will be less content, not higher prices. Higher prices will be with us for a very short time.
A-list columnists like ... Thomas Friedman? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Oh well (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh well, I just won't bother reading it then
Don't worry, you weren't missing much by skipping the New York Times these days; the paper is a pale shadow of its former self. Indeed, the New York Times has moved to the left in the past 30 years while the American mainstream has remained, largely center right. No doubt, I will be modded down by the Slashdot "enlightened ones" (who tend to lean left) for bringing this up, but it is true.
Remember that only 1/3 (to be very generous) of Americans would characterize themselves as "liberal" (in the American sense of that word, not "classically liberal" as it was and is understood in Europe). If the New York Times wants to fill that niche on the left then they have to be willing to give up a substantial portion of the "national audience" and it just isn't clear that a paper as large as the New York Times can afford to do that without diminishing in ambition and quality as compared to their glory days in the decades immediately following WWII.
Finally, if the people here on Slashdot want to understand better what it is that most Americans really want, then might I suggest the following book [amazon.com]? Even if you don't want the same sorts of things it helps to understand the values of mainstream America so that you can more effectively get at least some of what you want (when what you want lies just a bit outside the mainstream).
Re:Another View (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I think it says in general, the public are cheapskates AND the NYT has a non-viable business model.
Still, in a world built on scientific principles, you need to make the odd experiment. NYT are about to experiment with a metered access system. If the results are worrying, then it's time to experiment with the next business model.
There'll be one of three outcomes: They find one that works again, and it's business as usual, or they'll find that there's no business model available that lets them carry on as they are at the moment, so they'll cut corners until they have a compromise that works.. Or finally nothing seems to work, and they run out of money.
Smaller audience for Friedman and Dowd? (Score:4, Interesting)
Huzzah!
Seriously though, it seems that the management's earlier lesson didn't sink in too well:
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2007/09/17/new-york-times-figures-out-the-web-its-free/ [antiwar.com]
I get the "good journalism costs money" argument. However, what this shows is that while it is possible for businesses to make money off internet advertising, the Times couldn't figure out how to do it.
While I doubt we'll ever know, my guess is that their revenue from subscription will be less than that from advertising. If their top tier talent hang around, they will bleed money until they are bought by someone with deeper pockets (who will reverse this dumb-ass decision and start some serious cost cutting). If they walk, then the value of the business will shrink making them an unlikely target. My guess is the latter. The talent will walk. An "indie" Krugman/Friedman/Dowd blog could probably earn enough advertising revenue to support them. The rest will disappear.
If that happens then there will be a REAL shakeup in the old-school media franchises.
Re:Oh well: me, too (Score:5, Interesting)
Well up to a few years ago my City's bus service was in trouble. In the past 4 years though they have completely turned the service around. In the past 4 years, every price change has been a price cut, while going from being in debt to record surpluses.
They did that by simplifying the costs, making it easier to ride eliminating transfers (Including in seat transfers when the buses traveled between different sections of the city, making it possible that you would need to "transfer" up to 2 times while never exiting the bus) and only charging per ride and passes for unlimited rides for a certain period of time.
Unprofitable routes are now now mostly paid for by businesses on those routes in exchange for having preferential bus stop placement, or having the bus even pull into the companies parking lot at peak times for people arriving and departing.
The NYT could make it easier to pay for the articles (Text a code to a number, and 25 cents is added to your phone bill) Make it so sections covered by other newspapers are free, and have the nitch articles be paid, have all you can learn plans, offer early access to articles to companies in fields the company reports on at a premium subscription rate.
I want to pay! (Score:3, Interesting)
I know newspapers have to make a living, and I don't care if that comes out of my pocket. But they seem to be unable to come up with a payment model I can live with.
I access a lot of news sites. No way I can pay a subscription to all them, or even to all my favorites. There has to be some way I can access all those different sources without breaking the bank. But newspapers can't seem to find it. Micropayments seem to be an obvious solution that never goes anywhere. (Yes, I know all the objections. I'd take them more seriously if anybody actually tried it.) This notion of "metered" access sounds doable — if they can keep my recurring costs at a reasonable level.
Of course, they main reason newspapers are so anxious to monetize their web editions: the print editions are losing money hand over fist. Most newspapers have responded by cutting costs. But that means fewer pages, more fluff, less solid journalism. This drives away subscribers, and before you know it they're in a death spiral.
I recently heard an interesting interview with Jim Maroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News. He's taken quite a different approach:
We have continued to protect as much of our scale of journalists and journalistic resources in this market, adding pages to the paper instead of taking them out. One of the things that we have done is we have gone to our customers and said, look, we need to ask you to pay a greater proportion of the cost of publishing and distributing a newspaper to your home. In so doing, we've reduced our dependency on advertising.
The typical model for newspapers has been 80 percent advertising and 20 percent revenue from the people who buy the paper. By this time next year, we'll be something closer to 60/40, maybe even 55/45. To date, we're about 80 percent through all of our renewals, and 92 percent of our subscribers have agreed to pay a higher price, and I'm very proud of that. And I don't think we could have done it had we continued to cut our newsroom or continued to cut pages out of the paper.
End result: the paper is debt-free and profitable.
One wonders why more papers haven't gone this route. The answer I come up with is that most of them are controlled by big corporations, which are run by bean counters who know everything about "controlling costs" and nothing about actually providing something of value.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:3, Interesting)
And then there were none (Score:3, Interesting)
Every small town has a newspaper. Most larger ones have several.
This is simply not true.
The Courier Express folded in 1982.
The Buffalo News [owned by Warren Buffet] has been the only daily newspaper worth a damn in Western New York for twenty-eight years.
The one newspaper city has become the norm. The major city without a daily newspaper is a very close at hand.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Interesting)
Good luck with that. It works for the WSJ because the WSJ reports actual news; investors will not tolerate op-ed rants being passed off as news because it would make the WSJ worthless for financial analysts.
As a financial analyst, I call bullshit on that. Serious investors don't rely on the WSJ alone, exactly because it is full of brainless neocon op-eds, and gratuituos deliberate political spin even in its news articles. Anybody with a brain wouldn't rely on it for political/economic coverage, even if it often gets some basic company news right (though even there it doesn't hurt to double-check with the FT, or Bloomberg News, or the Economist or some other more reputable paper).
Re:NY Times can do it, can your paper do it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Many (but definitely not all) big-name columnists' opinions are in fact "better" than almost everyone in the blogosphere, for a few key reasons:
I'd trade 500 bloggers for 5 Times columnists any day of the week.
Re:RIP, New York Times (Score:3, Interesting)
These days, I get all my news from either FARK, Slashdot, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or The Colbert Report.
No you don't.
You are getting your news second, third or fourth hand.
Filtered and packaged by whatever passes for an editor at these sites. The Reader's Digest version.
The same thing happened with the Wall Street Journal, too -- they're not even on my radar anymore (Thanks, Rupert!)
A celebration of ignorance does not inspire confidence.
The WSJ is on your CEO's radar. His customers and clients. His financial backers. His home-town banker.
You need to know what they are thinking.
The Journal has the largest circulation of any newspaper in the United States. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the paper has a circulation of 2.1 million copies (including 400,000 paid, online subscriptions) as of October 2009 compared to USA Today's 1.9 million. Its main rival in the Business newspaper sector is the London-based Financial Times, which also publishes several international editions. The Wall Street Journal [wikipedia.org]
Re:How to do this right? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't agree I think journalism is far better than it was a decade ago. The blog community is providing excellent journalism and the cable news networks because they can focus on narrow segments of the market are increasing their quality to a level that I think is unmatched in television history.
I don't think there is any doubt you need to go back to the 1950s to find the kind of investigative reporting that is now readily available, and honestly I don't think even the 1950s is comparable.
I should say the NYTimes of 1953 could possibly charge for content. I can't see what the NYtimes of 2010 does that is far enough above the norm to survive when most competitors are free.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Interesting)
So the new news model, is as an aggregator of specialist journalists or more likely journalist teams. A group of journalists create team, so that they can provide continuous coverage, which is then feed to news aggregators. What hurts the New York Times most, is keeping the print presses running and keeping the associated staff on site, rather than just going all digital, with remote offices for everyone but the technical services team and editors.
The internet is doing to the news services what the government should do to banks, breaking it up into smaller more manageable pieces.
The digital convergence where there is no difference between, print, broadcast television, radio and cable is becoming a reality and they are no competing with each other directly. Add to that all the bloggers and journalist direct models and the writing is most definitely on the wall for the old world previous millennium mass media model, the model that basically buried itself in marketing as news bullshit.
I like most other people out there am only interested in a few artciles at a time and can no longer tolerate pages and pages of bullshit to get to a few truthful articles (the camouflage for the rest of the lies) and most certainly will not pay for all those lies.
I don't think so. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
Well , their suicide sets a good example for a dated corrupt media. A good idea defended by the founding fathers and others was reduced to a shallow meaningless lie of propaganda for government, liberal causes and big business. What doesn't evolve as necessary, dies as superfluous tripe. It won't be missed.
It won't die. It's too important to the ubiquitous propaganda effort required to keep Objective Reality subdued down to a mere nagging thought at the back of everybody's mind. My guess is that this NYT thing is a ploy which fits somehow into the whole internet crackdown which has been brewing in the wings. (The Obama White House, being just one player, is preparing some pretty crazy legislation to be unleashed on the world stage.)
Somewhat more real news comes from places like http://www.democracynow.org/ [democracynow.org] --Which while it doesn't touch certain things, is a helluva lot less doped up than the NYT.
-FL
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Interesting)
Could you give examples of members of the blog community which are providing excellent (original) journalism?
Re:The Times has its reasons for doing this... (Score:4, Interesting)
In today's world, W. Mark Felt would have had an anonymous identity and leaked good information to Firedoglake or Daily Kos. The blogs would have picked up on it. The information would have sounded credible and so a Rachel Maddow would have started to cover it in detail and the whole thing breaks a year earlier than it did under the Washington Post.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I can see how that kind of thing could be "crowdsourced", actually.
I'm more worried about the people that go to, say, local planning commission meetings. It's skilled work to follow that sort of thing and be able to give an interesting factual account. My fear is that the only "volunteer" coverage we'll see of that kind of thing is by people with an axe to grind and without necessarily a great grasp of the basics.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, I completely agree. I think the problem right now is in not identifying what areas do and do not need real journalists and instead paying a full time journalist for every stupid article.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Interesting)
"I'm more worried about the people that go to, say, local planning commission meetings."
What people? Where I live (close proximity to a State capital) they no longer go unless it is expected to be significant. I doubt they ever really did to any extent. Hell, their coverage of legislative action sucks.
"My fear is that the only "volunteer" coverage we'll see of that kind of thing is by people with an axe to grind and without necessarily a great grasp of the basics."
Already done. The best coverage is done by local access TV that records meetings and shows them on cable. Pretty much the best coverage of the legislature too. The only good coverage of local news seems to be done by the small weekly papers. They actually seem to have reporters at meetings.
I used to defend daily papers. But what little journalism and quality they had seems to have evaporated recently. It's pretty sad when I can get better information from a group of random people on the street or the internet than from a newspaper.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Interesting)
A blacklist is appropriate when your time is cheap, ie you can afford to wade through a lot of garbage to ferret out the nuggets that make it worthwhile. A whitelist is appropriate when your time is expensive, ie you are willing to miss out on the occasional nugget because the wading in garbage part is too much.
Since you're advocating a blacklist for news organizations, your time may simply be (perceived to be) less valuable than the commenter you respond to.
Of course, sites like slashdot and google news are positioning themselves somewhere in the middle, as a less drastic filter that allows the nuggets to float to the top by the combined efforts of thousands of readers of all backgrounds.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Interesting)
I should note the Tribune dislikes Murdoch, so don't equate them with his "reporting".
Re:Left and right (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't "classy libs" that chose to use the term "teabag" to describe the actions of sending teabags to Obama, hold "teabagging" parties and the like. The clueless choice of term was quite rightly mocked, and this carries no sembleance to the results of your "thinking". As soon as you can point to official "buttfuck" parties held by Liberals, where they "buttfuck" right wingers, your "thinking" will accidentally appear insightful.
Perhaps that is what you're hoping will happen? Quite a coup if it happens, I say.
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Interesting)
The key to having a pay-walled site is that you have content that people cannot live with. The Wall Street Journal is one such site that has been profitable almost from day one. The NYT already tried to pay-wall the editorials once and they nearly had the writers quit because they had lost their audience. This could be a serious mistake for the NYT.