NYTimes Confirms It Will Start Charging For Online News In 2011 368
jmtpi writes "The article is frustratingly vague, but the New York Times is confirming earlier speculation that it will start charging online readers who visit the site regularly. Occasional users will still get free access to a certain number of articles per month. Most of the key details are not yet determined, but the system is scheduled to be deployed at the beginning of next year."
The Times is planning on rolling its own pay system, and it will doubtless use the rest of 2010 to look at how sites like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times fare before deciding on specifics. How often do you readers typically hit articles at nytimes.com in a given month? We try to avoid linking to stories behind paywalls when possible, and if the Times chooses a low monthly limit, you'll probably see a lot fewer links to their site — which would be a shame.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
"This time it's different!"
Yes, it is. Much more competition, the Great Recession, high unemployment. 3 more reasons to fail.
The industry needs massive consolidation - like maybe 90% of the print papers folding.
I was considering a subscription (Score:2, Insightful)
But the big issue with the NYT is that despite being a global player, it still has this New York focus that makes it less useful for those of us not in New York. The BBC does truly global coverage, and there's no American equivalent. NYT is the closest we have, but they're going to have to do more to prove that they're a global player and not just a regional paper with really good national and international coverage before I pull out my wallet.
I never access NYTimes. (Score:4, Insightful)
Back when NYTimes had set up a paywall/registration-required site, I never wanted to go through the hoops to get to an article. After they stopped doing that, it was just sort of habit not to read articles on the site. So why change now?
Re:Duh. (Score:1, Insightful)
Unless I'm mistaken papers don't make shit when you pay for them, that is just helping to offset the cost of the paper/ink itself. A paper really makes its money on ad space, how many eyeballs can they tell an advertiser will see their ad.
When things started migrating to the internet the powers that be didn't really think that the eyeballs that would see their ads on the web would be worth as much as those that saw it in print. Because of this they priced themselves too low. When papers started declining and the web took off they lost a lot of revenue, even though they have the same or probably even more eyeballs on the ads.
Also, most news organizations don't do shit unless it's very local. All they do is scrap stories from AP or from Bloomberg, reword it and then print it as their own. Hell sometimes they don't even do that and just print the story exactly as it is in AP, byline and all.
And don't forget bugmenot.com
A word of thanks and a request (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me first thank everyone who's submitted an article to Slashdot with a link to something I've written. The comments are almost always a great gift and I look forward to reading most of what people write, especially the ones who RTFA.
My only request is for everyone to be open to new ways of paying for the synthesis of information. It is very difficult for humans to compete with the robot link farms and the casual content created on places like Facebook. If we want people to synthesize we have to find some way to come together as a society and fund them.
I realize that it's attractive to look at the almost non-existent distribution costs of digital content and imagine a world where information can be completely free, but this avoids dealing with the costs of creating it in the first place. We need to find a good way for everyone who consumes content to effectively share the costs of creating it. If we don't, the information ecosystem will collapse.
Please be open to the writers and publishers who are going to try out more mechanisms for distributing the costs among the consumers. Try them out and reward the ones that deliver something of value. Ignore the ones that aren't worth your time. But please don't dismiss them out of hand.
Finally, I want to point out a piece I've written about some of the downsides of the free ecosystem for information. Perhaps this might suggest that there are some advantages in embracing a paywall, at least occasionally.
http://www.wayner.org/node/67 [wayner.org]
It won't work, and it is unlikely to be tried... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't pay for access to news (unless looking at ads counts as paying). Few single news sources cover a high enough percentage of the kinds of stories I am interested for me to allocate actual money to said sources. I'd like access to Nature, and New Scientist, and a number of technical sources, but rely on "second hand" access as other free sources report on *their* stories. Given that I rarely complete covering these summaries in a day before I have to actually deal with life in the real world, I don't think it is worth my money to get access to things I don't have time to ready anyway.
The Fate of any news service behind a pay wall or limited free pay wall is obscurity. No news story in the NY Times can remain exclusive to the NY Times unless nobody cared about that story in the first place.
But I like the idea that they are going to "wait and see" how others will fare over the year. I don't have to wait, I can tell them their growth and revenue will be flat at best. Them kind of returns are not going to excite the NY Times, and I'd bet in the end this will never really happen.
an offer they can't refuse? (Score:3, Insightful)
- which would be a shame.
Is this the slashdot mafia coming out? "Nice article. Shame is something were to... happen to our link to it."
Re:Duh. (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't charge to pay for the ink. They charge to establish the value of the eyes. "Free" papers are valued less by advertisers because the think the readers aren't invested enough in the product to read it as much as "paid for" papers.
This "free/paid-for" model absolutely extends to web operations.
Re:Duh. (Score:4, Insightful)
the reason they are losing relevance is because they chose to give up relevance in doing their newswork.
Instead of articles covering issues with the government we get tiger woods, britney spears smeared all over the front page. That would be, you know irrelevant as a news company yet every one of them, times included, does that.
So really, they're just speeding up the result of their own decision. good riddance.
Re:Duh. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with paper is paper itself. Paper costs have been doing up steadily for decades. Gas costs increase. Ink costs increase, and the demand for a high quality printed product increases.
It's too much. The physical print product has been getting more expensive, delivered to a smaller area, and at the same time, becoming a smaller product because the phbs have chosen to scrimp on content generation on top of everything else.
So yea, of course it's been shrinking. But that doesn't mean people aren't interested in the content. Doesn't mean people wouldn't be willing to pay for high quality content.
The best thing that could happen to the print industry is the death of the actual printed product. It is the source of at least 75% of their costs.
However a quality ad supported product is a pipe dream. And even if you could support a product on that tiny revenue stream, it'd be a crap product, utterly beholden to its advertisers.
Re:Duh. (Score:1, Insightful)
Doesn't mean people wouldn't be willing to pay for high quality content.
And there is the NYT's problem in a nutshell, most people who have been exposed to its product don't believe it is high quality.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Fair Price" is exactly what will determine if this fails or succeeds.
NY Times Select would have been ok if it was say $12 a year instead of $50.
The problem is that the media seems to be happy to perpetuate the image that "people do not pay for media online". It's just not true.
How many people here pay for Pandora or Slacker? What about Fark? What about the new Ars subscriptions? What about forum accounts from SomethingAwful?
Frankly, what I really want would be a micro-transaction sort of system. I would be happy to pay 5 cents per article I read on NY times. Sounds tiny right? I'd say I read at least 5 articles on a week day. That's a quarter a day, $5 a month. More than the $50 they ask for.
Yet I'm sure more people would be attracted to the 5C per article model vs the $50 upfront subscription.
Re:A word of thanks and a request (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The grey lady should look before leaping (Score:5, Insightful)
Most would argue that the NYTimes has both original reporting and a better experience. Their website is nice and clean, and they're still one of (if not the) premier newspaper in the world. For example, they broke the NSA wiretapping story.
It would be highly damaging if they were to disappear. It's not like they could just be replaced.
Re:Duh. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
My idea (and I've actually cornered the CEO of the media company I work for in an elevator, and made him listen to it) is that all new news should be for-pay. You should have to subscribe or do a micro-transaction or something.
But after 2 weeks or a month, it should be free. That way you get your upfront revenue, but then you can take advantage of the long tail as well, and sell ads on that content.
The newspaper I work for is almost 200 years old (not a journalist, just a techie). Can you imagine the value of that much content if it were indexed and made available? This isn't wikipedia: this is primary source, research material. Stick an ad on it, and make your nickel off something that was written more than a hundred years ago.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
The industry needs massive consolidation - like maybe 90% of the print papers folding.
Arguably, they already have. The newspapers have been merging with each other like crazy.
When it comes to producing "real news", there are only a few newspapers left beyond the local level. All newspapers that run national news subscribe to the wire services; they're really just sharing stories with each other.
When local "big" news breaks (e.g. shooting, bridge collapse), the wire service story starts as local news in the local paper, then gets picked up nationally.
For truly national news, only a few papers report it: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press's own reporters, plus the news networks and a few very high-end bloggers. That's about it for news gathering. Everybody else is just relaying it from the others.
Their international bureaus are nearly all gone as well, except for the papers I mentioned, and they're cut back.
The local papers still have a reason to exist, the local news, but for national and international, they get it faster and better online. Unfortunately, local news has a poor draw, and often doesn't even merit a daily paper, even in a medium-sized city.
You don't want to lose them; they do important work as the Fourth Estate on the local level. But nobody seems to care much about it.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't want to lose them; they do important work as the Fourth Estate on the local level. But nobody seems to care much about it.
I think people believe that good reporting appears out of nowhere, or something of that sort. They also seem to think that bloggers are the equivalent to professional journalists, instead of simply being the web equivalent of "talking heads".
I mourn for the loss of a vibrant press in the US simply because people want shit for free and can't stand to pay a buck for a paper.
Re:Plenty of other sources (Score:3, Insightful)
People who think that Teabaggers are reasonable, intelligent members of a grassroots political group consider the NYT to be of dubious journalistic quality.
Fixed that for ya.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think some people believe that good reporting appears, period. My experience with news media is that they have distorted every story I've had personal knowledge of. Every so often, some journalist will be caught with outright lies and disciplined, but I don' t know how many get away with it.
I'm willing to pay for news (and I do), but I'd like the opportunity to pay for good journalism.
Re:Duh. (Score:2, Insightful)
Fortunately there are still good sources of news for computer related news. Sites like Anandtech where actual testing occurs and research is done and presented as justification for claims made. I can only hope the rest of the news industry can somehow reclaim that which once made them an important part of a free nation.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
So groklaw.net isn't up to the standards of "professional journalism?"
Maybe you should talk to a few professional journalists ... they'll tell you about the on-the-job office politics, the ass-kissing, the stories that get spiked because someone's favourite ox is getting barbequed, the "we want to slant it differently", the "our stories have to reflect our new owners core values" ... amateurs can do as good a job, or better, simply because they don't have to kiss ass to keep their paycheck.
Don't count on any newspapers being around in 10 years.
Re:Duh. (Score:3, Insightful)
1. There first is 'news' in your description. What is actually happening on the ground. This can NOW, be largely attained for free, or very low cost.
2. They offer you analysis of the 'news'. What they predict will happen, what trends are going around, ramifications of 'news', and their opinions of what happened.
3. Adverts. These are supposed to pay for 2 above.
Print editions also supply you paper, and your subscription supposedly pays for the paper and delivery.
The problem is that this model is not working now. The internet has pulled the advert money from the papers, and spread it out over the entire internet. The papers are going through a paradigm change, and are not acknowledging it. They are attempting for people to pay for 2 instead of ads, and getting the ads to pay for the medium. Everyone is up in arms because they used to get item 2 for 'free'; rather it was paid for by someone else. Now it is getting flipped.
I hope that news outlets can survive this transition. It will mean better news for everyone. When they are not responsible, or dependant on advertisers’ money they truly will be independent. And if you look at the ‘best’ journalist institutions around you will find that almost all of them don’t bow to governments, or corporations.
Re:Duh. (Score:3, Insightful)
What happened to news reporters doing actual investigative journalism and research to try and bring the public a deep perspective on something?
It costs money to keep journalists on staff that may only produce one or two long articles a year. And since they are long and in-depth, few people will read them. Even fewer will pay to read them, these days, since apparently everything on the Internet is supposed to be free.
It's a deadly circle. Expecting news reports to be perfect is unreasonable. Reading them anyway just because they're "free" is feeding the problem.
Re:Duh. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Duh. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Duh. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I think there are far more people than you think around the world who read the NYTimes and would be willing to pay a small price to read it online and on their slate/kindle/device of the future. I know I would happily pay a subscription of a few $ a month for it, which if you added it up could come to an awful lot out of the over 300 million people on Earth who read in English. It has better international coverage than other US papers, and that many here in the UK.
The problem with newspapers nowadays is that not many people bother to buy dead tree products when they can get the same thing online, and papers have ended up subsidising their online operations with a shrinking revenue from a dying branch of the business and paltry advertising revenue. So long as they don't price themselves out of the market, this is great news I think, though if they tried putting columnists only behind a paywall, they'd soon find out how much people think their wittering is worth.
PS I'm unconvinced that the NYT subscriber figures were consistently falling before they even had a website in 1996, but can't find subscriber figures, can you?
Re:Duh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Groklaw is the exception that proves the rule. It's also a bit too narrowly-focused and activist to be considered a "news source".
Maybe you're okay with that. I'm not.
Regardless of whether or not you're okay with it, it's changing, because newspapers no longer make sense.
Given the pre-Internet structure of the costs involved in collecting and distributing news, newspapers used to make perfect sense, both in terms of providing access to a moderately accurate snapshot of what's going on (if you think it was EVER highly accurate, you're fooling yourself) and as a business. But that's no longer the case, on either front.
With respect to the accuracy of the information, journalists always end up getting it a little bit wrong. Blogs actually do a much better job of reporting accurately, in part because they tend to have a narrow focus and deep knowledge about that focus, and in part because of reader comments. There is the potential disadvantage of bias, but I think the theoretical lack of bias in traditional news sources is overrated at the least -- and it's often pure fiction. Prior to the early 20th century newspapers were also openly biased, and that works just fine as long as you know what the bias is. In fact, I'd argue that it works better than reading something that is supposedly unbiased. At a minimum, reading clearly-biased news encourages you to read critically.
With respect to the business model, I don't really even need to go into it. Newspapers just don't work in an Internet-enabled world.
I think where we're heading is a world where deep investigative reporting is done primarily by amateurs, and I think they'll do it far better than the professionals ever did. Professional news organizations will still exist, but they'll be oriented primarily around local news and columns, plus collecting, sifting and publishing important blogger-written articles, all in a video soundbite format (much of the footage will be amateur) with embedded advertising. The future equivalent of a deep cover-to-cover read of a news paper will be sitting down with a feed of such soundbite articles and following the links to the deeper amateur coverage.
I'm sure that sounds distasteful to you, but I think it will result in coverage that is broader, deeper and more accurate, with less tolerance for misinformation or propaganda, precisely because everyone recognizes the constant possibility of propaganda.
Re:Duh. (Score:2, Insightful)
You know what people don't like?
Having to buy $50 of credit so they can view 5 cent articles
Having to click, yes, charge me a nickel every time they want to read an article
You might read 5 articles a day, but I probably would read 1 or two articles a week. You know what my credit card company doesn't like? Having me call them to contest a bill for 20 cents because it doesnt say NYT, it says (whatever company NYT sells collections to).
The vast majority of people would prefer a subscription model. No worrying about whether you got charged twice for reading the an article at breakfast and rereading in the evening, or both my cellphone and my desktop. No worrying about the page not loading.
You want to pay for single use reading material, whereas I want a subscription where I can go back and read an article again whenever I want without paying again. Oh wait, I already get a newspaper.
Re:A word of thanks and a request (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, both those sites pull or reference (via foot notes) from the NYT's free content service. If they close it off, Google will be advertising NYT instead of showing results, and Wikipedia will be just gossip and have less fact checking.
Yes and no. If the NYT wasn't the source of information, I'd still find plenty of indications that Mr. Wayner has written quite a few books (book sellers such as Amazon, mentions of specific works in blogs, mentions in articles, among other interesting references). Likewise, I'd know he's written pieces for the NYT from similar references. And apparently, he's written for other works. And there's his own blog. Google would provide plenty of information without the NYT.
Likewise, if we struck the current entry for Mr. Wayner from Wikipedia, I'm sure someone who was sufficiently motivated to ensure he has an entry could gleen enough information from the very same Google search I performed. The current entry isn't very complex. In fact, my Google search provides more insight to who Mr. Wayner might be than his Wikipedia entry. The Wikipedia entry simply confirmed that he was what Google was implying he might be.
Now - even if we ignore all that, let's say the sole source of information for the who of Mr. Wayner was the NYT. I'd hit the first paywall and abandon my effort.