Who Will Control the Cost of the NYT On Digital Readers? 217
RobotRunAmok writes "Ryan Tate, at Gawker, describes the 'heated turf war' waging at the New York Times. The print and digital divisions have differing views over how much a subscription to the Gray Lady (iPad edition) should cost. The print troops believe $20-$30 monthly is the proper price point (fearing that setting the mark any lower will jeopardize print distribution), while the digital soldiers are digging in their heels at $10 a month. The Kindle version is already managed by the Print Army, so don't count on logic necessarily driving any decisions here. It's complicated: the Web version of the paper is still free through 2011, and the computer 'Times Reader' has already been released and priced at $14.95 monthly."
$10 for crap, or $20-$30 for crap? Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it really matter? The price doesn't change the fact that the NYT's journalism is basically shit most of the time, even though they are one of the most "respect" papers in the US.
Their coverage of the run-up to the Iraqi War was abysmal, for instance. It was pretty clear then that they should have done their journalistic duty and printed much more about how those pushing for war were just plain wrong. And now we know that they basically just repeated the lies and bullshit spewed by various Republican and Democrat politicians during that time period.
It's not a "Democrats vs. Republicans" or "left vs. right" situation, either. They should be tearing Obama and the Democrats several new assholes for their handling of Wall Street, Afghanistan and other issues. But for whatever reason, they don't, or if they try to it's quite feebly done.
The NYT, were it actually concerned with journalism, would themselves be ripping into Wall Street and corporate America. But then again, I suppose they can't, because they seem more concerned with advertising revenue over realistic and quality reporting.
Regardless of what they charge, I'm not going to pay any money for their content when they don't ask the hard-hitting questions of politicians and corporations, and do the real investigative journalism that's worthy of money.
Printed newspapers is a shrinking segment (Score:5, Insightful)
Digital media is distruptive technology. If the NYT doesn't clobber their print sales someone else is going to do the job for them.
Egon said it best (Score:3, Insightful)
Print is dead.
Economics 102 (Score:3, Insightful)
The consumer will. The consumer ultimately determines the value of any item sold.
Different Prices? (Score:3, Insightful)
What they should do is just charge $X for the stories, giving them all digital formats (as digital is relatively free to distribute). and then charge a little extra if they also want it in print, as that actually costs them money to print.
This way it looks like if you want NYT available to you in all formats you would need to fork over ($10-$30)+Free+$14.95+(whatever they charge for paper)= [lots of money]
Business model fundamentally broken (Score:4, Insightful)
Dear reader, consider
The New York Times has chosen to cling to the conventional business model as long as possible. But there is a better way [nytimes.com]: recognize that newspapers are something special, and have worth in society as more than just another business. Endow them and let them self-finance.
Re:Economics 102 (Score:5, Insightful)
How's that working out for you with Comcast and Shell Oil, by the way? They both accepted it when you put your foot down, did they?
Re:Watch that price, NYT (Score:5, Insightful)
A good newspaper should be doing that for you. Newspapers are no longer about delivering 'breaking news'. The 24/7 news cycle has ended that. The typical readership of a quality newspaper know what happened in the world yesterday. They want to know why it happened and what the consequences might be.
Today newspapers should be about the insightful commentary, bringing together of sources and unique investigative journalism. Of course these are also the most expensive parts, so have been targeted for cuts by many newspapers.
The problem the print division at the NYT faces is that the cost per printed copy is directly dependent on subscription volume. So if folk stop taking the paper copy, they cost to produce it increases - you have all the same costs for typesetting and running a print works, you just saved some cents worth of paper and a blob of ink.
Re:Watch that price, NYT (Score:5, Insightful)
To me? I dont think the NYT is worth more than $4.99 a month. and that is only if it's available on ANY of my readers not just a blessed one they want me to have.
Honestly, they have to compete with every other source of news on the net, Many free, some I pay for. and honestly the "lyfestyle" and other sections I really dont care about so they have a zero value to me. AND not being a New York resident it has even lower value to me as it's only a source for national news which I can get myself elsewhere. Google,CNN,Yahoo and others give me a ton of that for free. So outside of NY the NYT has even a lower value, most people I know think my $4.99 is way too much.
Re:Economics 102.5 (Score:2, Insightful)
An even better example would be natural gas prices. Remember when Enron got caught in its scheme to artificially inflate natural gas prices? They had shell companies bidding and selling to each other driving the price up by creating artificial demand.
Of course when the scheme was uncovered the price of natural gas should have dropped down to the consumer set price...
It didn't drop at all. The price is at the still artificial high. The ultimate consumer of the product doesn't have the power to influence the local monopoly enough to drive the price down.
The people still in the gas business are splitting the revenues from the mark up.
Some free market huh?
Re:Economics 102 (Score:5, Insightful)
Different markets.
NYT has competition. There are still plenty of news sources out there, even if you're in the market for local news in New York City. If they set their price too high, people will choose others. They aren't a monopoly.
Comcast is a monopoly, at least in my area. If Comcast sets their price too high, I could still choose others, but no one else is authorized to use the cheapest means to reach my house (coaxial cable), so it's not competition in any real sense. I can't go to anyone else and get wired Internet for any price, and wireless options are either slower or more expensive (and usually both). The only other possible competitor is our somewhat-new local phone company (Fairpoint) and they are imploding at the moment, so I don't expect to see any new service offerings from them between now and their Chapter 7 declaration, which many of us are expecting any month now.
Re:Economics 102.5 (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, why would the consumer want to cook? Or heat their house? Or want hot water?
Silly consumers, buying overpriced necessities from a monopoly! They should just pay $5000 and convert all their appliances over to run on energy provided by the local electric grid.
Oh, wait, that's usually another monopoly....
Re:Watch that price, NYT (Score:3, Insightful)
We are well beyond the need to save ink.
Yes, because the purpose of contractions is solely to save ink, thus elegantly explaining their ubiquity in spoken language...
Re:OT: a la carte pricing (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually I have canceled Cable-TV. It's worthless to me and my wife. If we want to watch TV we turn on the TV and tune in one of the local ATSC channels. If there is a specific show, mythbusters for example, I simply retrieve it from a friends house where I set them up a mythtv box. we add what few shows we like to it and make them transcode to avi on a rss feed for me. when we go over there I simply grab the files on my netbook and we are good to go.
I get the free tv shows without the risk of torrenting them and having the Content police come and kill us, my friend get's a high end DVR built for him.
works great. I'd LOVE to be able to subscribe to Mythbusters as a tv show for $2.00 a month whe nthere are new episodes (maybe $12.00 a year total cost as they make very few episodes anymore) but they will not do that. Discovery will not sell me a non drm file I can play anywhere.
so my only choices are record at friends house, or download a torrent. either way I'm not spending $100.00 a month to stream utter crap into my home for the 3 tv shows I have any interest in.
Re:Watch that price, NYT (Score:3, Insightful)
Likewise you forget the costs of the servers, the electricity, the computer screens, the work done to typeset/format the webpage, where the articles are placed, etc. etc. It ends-up being essentially a wash... no significant difference in paper versus website costs. Actually it's not just you. I've noticed a lot of slashdotters mistakenly believe websites/servers/et cetera cost no money to operate.
How perplexing?
more for less? (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a Kindle subscription to the NYT, but canceled it recently because it didn't have a lot of the cool stuff - like the puzzle. I couldn't see the point to paying for a neutered product.
Re:Watch that price, NYT (Score:3, Insightful)
I can assure you that the cost of entry into digital distribution is a heck of a lot lower than that for printing a newspaper.
The overheads to produce, print, distribute and sell a printed newspaper, overnight to every major city in the United States are massive and really cannot be legitimately compared to the digital equivalent.
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
Cutting print circulation to that extent results in each printed copy of the paper costing $12,134.1
Compare the cost of a full page ad in the NYT with the cost of a banner ad on a web page. That might be a hint as to why they'd rather not cannibalize their printed subscription base.
* The result of extensive economic calculations, or made up?
Re:Watch that price, NYT (Score:3, Insightful)
The overheads to produce, print, distribute and sell a printed newspaper, overnight to every major city in the United States are massive and really cannot be legitimately compared to the digital equivalent.
On the contrary, I'll guarantee you that the accountants for the NYT and every other newspaper can tell you to the penny just how much both paper and electronic production and distribution costs them. And comparing the two sets of numbers is totally legitimate in any business setting.
The real problem is that the accountants can't tell you the price point that will maximize their future income from either method. That depends on the whims of their customers, not on any price lists that suppliers can give to the accountants.
Part of the problem, of course, is that electronic distribution now has costs that are orders of magnitude smaller than paper distribution. But this doesn't mean that such costs are some holy Mystery that's unknowable by mere humans. The publishers are just having problems coming to terms with this huge drop in their production costs, since it clearly means they should charge less for delivery by this new technology. But their management structure (and self image) is built partly on the costs of the old hard-copy delivery, and restructuring of such magnitude is always difficult for any human organization.
Re:Watch that price, NYT (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Business model fundamentally broken (Score:3, Insightful)
Bull. If you want to argue no paper is 100% "unbiased" (whatever that would mean), then I agree, since it's an impossible standard. But some are much better than others at presenting factual information supporting multiple viewpoints on a wide range of issues.
Re:Watch that price, NYT (Score:4, Insightful)
You think The Economist is alarmist, irrational, and content-free, whereas the blogs of your "favorite analysts" are a better source? I'm not sure if you understand what reporting actually is, as opposed to opinion.
Re:Watch that price, NYT (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it's a generational thing. Older folks, like, oh, say, Rupert Murdoch, believe that a newspaper is a newspaper, no matter what its format, and you should pony up for it. Serious investigative journalism costs real money, they say. Fair enough. But of course, Murdoch goes too far, in pricing content too high and with this nonsense of trying shake down search engines for even linking to content.
Middle-age folks like me, who grew up w/o the internet but are still young enough to fully embrace it, might be willing to pay, but as yog said, watch that price. We know that distribution costs on the web are close to nothing, so don't price your content as if it costs the same as print. I don't know what that price is, but you better keep it down and offer a la carte pricing too.
The younger generation, the people who grew up with the internet, well, most of them figure you're a chump if you pay for *any* internet content, so who knows how you get them to suddenly value it. But media companies only have themselves to blame for not creating pay models years ago that could have steered cultural attitudes about the dollar worth of journalism on the web.
Re:Watch that price, NYT (Score:4, Insightful)
Go here: http://www.glennbeckclips.com/02-18-10.htm [glennbeckclips.com] [glennbeckclips.com] (or simply glennbeckclips.com if that link is broke) and watch Segments 3 and 4, and tell me they are not insightful, or at least educational, in regards to our debt situation.
Did he manage to make it through two entire segments without crying?