NYTimes Unveils Online Subscription Plan 194
An anonymous reader writes "The NYTimes announces their three pricing tiers for digital access. An interesting note: 'Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.'"
Two words why I'll never buy a NYT subscription (Score:5, Insightful)
Judith Miller. To paraphrase a surprisingly insightful comment from Ben Affleck, the NYT might be revered by older generations who lived through their glory days, but as someone who started following politics around Clinton's impeachment, the first thing I saw them do was sell a bullshit war and quite probably staff CIA-friendly propagandists.
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In NYC, it was just under $6/week delivered to your door(man). I have to assume that they don't get much ad revenue for the online edition and so they can't sell the "paper" as inexpensively.
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I think that's just the intro price. I punched in a friend's manhattan zip code, and it offers it for $5.85/week for 8 weeks, but then it almost doubles.
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Well, it's a buck fifty if you just buy it from the guy downstairs :)
Either way, it has to be ad revenue if the costs are so similar. Can you imagine the cost of the paper, cost of delivery, and then giving a cut to the newsstand guy? Distribution is comparatively free on the web.
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People not involved in publishing like to VASTLY overestimate printing and distribution costs. For a paper with NYT's circulation per-copy printing cost is miniscule and per-copy distribution isn't much either.
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Still, I'd bet the breakdown is something like 10 cents worth of paper, a quarter for the reseller, and another dime for the transportation. In short, almost 50 cents per paper per day. For a month that is almost 15 bucks. I guess I could be wildly off, but if anything it seems low :)
People on the web seem to have divined that the times spends over $600 million on distribution and about $200 million on their newsroom. They have under 900,000 readers. That's an ominous $666 per reader per year, or over $55 p
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Re:Two words why I'll never buy a NYT subscription (Score:5, Interesting)
My basic view on the New York Times is that it is best read the way the Soviets used to read Pravda: The purpose of reading it isn't to learn the truth, it's to learn what those in power want you to think.
That's not a useless exercise, but it's also not what it appears to be.
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Re:Two words why I'll never buy a NYT subscription (Score:4, Insightful)
A 'Soviet' is a type of administrative council, not a denonym for citizens of the former Soviet Union.
Just like "Shimmer", it's both!
Did you just graduate from a course or something? The word "Soviet" has been used in the West for decades to describe citizens and the government of the Soviet Union. It is also commonly used as an adjective to describe other things associated with the USSR. That's what happens when you put the word "Soviet" in your country name.
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You must have recently immigrated to America. Welcome. For your first lesson in American idiom:
Soviet n. 2. A citizen of the U.S.S.R. Chiefly in pl. (hence loosely, = the Soviet Union or its leaders). [Courtesy of the OED]
with the first cited usage dating to 1920:
1920 Commercial & Financial Chron. 24 Jan. 288/1 He [sc. Clemenceau] insisted upon writing the final paragraph, ‘affirming that the Allies had not changed their attitude towards the Soviets’.
1930 Amer. Speech 6 121 (heading) Jailed Soviets go on hunger strike.
1959 Daily Tel. 7 Feb. 11/4 President Eisenhower, seeking one word to cover citizens of the Soviet Union, has braved the criticism of purists and adopted the term ‘Soviets’.
This concludes your daily lesson in American Idiom.
Not a "In Soviet Russia" Joke... (Score:2)
My basic view on the New York Times is that it is best read the way the Soviets used to read Pravda: The purpose of reading it isn't to learn the truth, it's to learn what those in power want you to think.
That's not a useless exercise, but it's also not what it appears to be.
Well, you can tell by the way I post my reply,
I know my stuff for a geeky guy.
I come to Slashdot for my news.
I'm a techie dude; I just can't lose.
Now it's alright. It's okay. You may look the other way.
But we can try to understand the New York Times' effect on man. [youtube.com]
Ah, ah, ah, ah, modded +5, modded +5.
Ah, ah, ah, ah modded plus fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!
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BBC and AP (Score:2, Offtopic)
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Well, this is their third attempt at digital subscriptions, so I would hope they are improving.
And Murdoch has nothing to do with the NYT.
This sucks (Score:2)
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I'm really upset about this. I love the NYT and it's my favorite general news source; but I simply can't justify paying that much. I guess us poor people who read a lot of news aren't in their target demographic.
Or just Google a bit to find a link to the article you want to read through a supported "search, blogs and social media" page that'll bypass the limit when you hit it. Shouldn't be a problem for current news, but will be an issue for historic articles. (Which I can understand charging for more than I can charging for everything.) This beats the hell out of what my local newspaper's done, they erected a paywall for everything. Even the most recent articles you can read a paragraph of and that's it, other
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Don't worry, trickle down economics will fix this problem for you.
Yes indeed! It will reduce the surplus population, and then there's more tuppence for the rest of us.
Polish yer iPad, govna?
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The fourth estate has been asphyxiating since Watergate. Set up bloggers with an editor and a fact checker, toss in a couple reference links at the bottom - bingo, fourth estate.
A million bloggers hitting random keys for ten hours a day will probably stumble on a fact or two.
Overpriced, by a long shot. (Score:2)
At 35USD every 4 weeks, they overpriced by a wide margin. Clearly they missed this article [slashdot.org]. Try 35USD/yr and I might think about it.
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At that price its cheaper for home delivery of the print edition 7 days a week.
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For what it's worth, I'll leave that to the trolls, The Daily on the ipad is $39 a year. I've been using the free trial and it's got a bit too much sports and gossip for me, but no more than print tabloids if that's what you like.
The recently launched news aggregate app, "Zite," is fairly slick and I can see it becoming my usual news over breakfast.
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Your signature is ironically appropriate:
$30/year gets me a full year of qualify fantasy and science fiction (Asimov's) whereas the Times offers nothing that valuable. I can hear the news for free (via google).
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
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>>>your signature makes you look like an idiot.
$7/14 gigabytes versus $40/5 gigabytes
1/2 dollar per GB
v. 8 dollars per GB
THAT'S the point. Of course if Verizon Wireless were still unlimited I agree with you, that it would be the better choice. But now that it's capped, it sucks. You're being waaaay overcharged. It should be closer to the cost of a DSL or cable hookup --- about 20 cents per GB.
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I completely understood your original point; albeit completely invalid and meaningless. The fact that I explained to you why your point is stupid and then you turn around and further explain your stupid point, is...well..stupid.
Next you'll use birds to explain why cars are over priced. Or oranges to explain why gas costs too much. Or even better, you'll use colors to explain why things are pointy.
You are comparing apples and orange trees and insisting the price of apples has everything to do with the price
why would I pay for news? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm confused. Why would I ever want to pay for news?
I've got free news from: cnn.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, bbc.uk, new radio, various news apps on my smartphone, and tens of thousands of idiotic commentary available to me across the web.
What has NYT got that I can't get elsewhere for free?
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I do find their articles higher quality on average than the sources you listed, though for basic news reporting the difference isn't large, and for in-depth analysis there are alternatives that seem like they won't be paywalled (at least for now), like The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Their strength imo is fairly timely, news-ish analysis (versus long-form essay), but with at least a medium amount of context/analysis and independent reporting that isn't purely cribbed from Reuters or the Associated Press.
No
Re:why would I pay for news? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Your automotive knowledge is incredibly thin, which is ok, but you present the topic as if you are informed, which is not ok.
Also, "domestic cars are junk, foreign cars are awesome" is such an 80s/90s remnant attitude. Time to drop it, just as the "domestic cars are awesome, foreign cars have horrible ergonomics and build quality" was a 60s/70s remnant attitude that was also rightfully dropped.
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You could, I could. We don't have to.
The GP is talking about a poor person. I've never met a poor person with good credit or the sense not to want the biggest loan/car they can get. I think those points might be related.
But the GP is wrong about just about everything else in his post. He knows fuckall about cars. My oldest car is a 1960, it still runs good. Brakes (4 wheel drum) work as designed, which is not so good.
Wait until he actually has to buy parts for his euro-junk.
Re:why would I pay for news? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why would you pay for news? Perhaps because you value journalism?
Pretty much, this is why I'm subscribed to the local paper even though I just read the copy at work.
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Not at $15/month - I value the NY Times, but they need to regain their reputation for premium journalism before I'll pay a premium price. In recent years they've been buffaloed too often into kowtowing to the right-wings false "Republican say all true Americans believe Earth Center of Universe - Some Dem's disagree" neutrality, and now seem to think there's no downside to that?
Pug
Re:why would I pay for news? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you pay for news? Perhaps because you value journalism? Because high quality journalism is essential for a well functioning democracy?/quote> Of course, that still leaves the question as to why would you pay for the New York Times?
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While I agree all of that is valid, how is any of that related to the New York Times? There is a story about the dresses Lindsay Lohan wears to her court dates on the New York Times home page right now. There are also lots of fluffy pop stories like "Proud to be Japanese" and how to find a drink in Times Square.
The New York Times has had journalism problems since at least the mid 90's, and has been replaced in relevance by an ever increasing number of news sources. The US produces a great many things, bu
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No it doesn't. Right now, the front page of the digital version covers the news in Japan (quite a few articles), an article on UN resolutions about Lybia, a couple of articles about the Arab revolutions in general and an article about the value of not getting a college education.
Yeah,
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Right. Google News, disable Entertainment, use Greasemonkey to hide the video/fast flip/most shared junk. 100% free news, 100% Lindsay Lohan-free.
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100% free? So all those professional journalists work for free? That's generous of them.
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Oooh, cutting insight! Next you can explain to me that Internet searches aren't free, because somebody is paying for the hardware and bandwidth and engineers at Google and Bing and Yahoo! And the fates of AltaVista, Cuil, Infoseek, and others is proof that free search is doomed. Accordingly, since I value Internet search, I should join a paid subscription Internet indexing and search site.
Ahem. Now, back over at arguments worth actual attention, rather than derision and dismissal, the putative advantage
Wasn't (Score:2)
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If you value honest journalism, why would you give your hard-earned money to the frauds at the NYT?
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Because information has value (Score:3)
Why would I ever want to pay for news?
Because it has value to you. People have been paying for news or information (one way or another) for a long time. Information has value and people ARE willing to pay for it. I certainly am and I suspect you are too, at least up to a point.
The problem is that it's very difficult to figure out exactly what information is valuable to specific people and even harder to place a dollar value on that information. What I value is certainly different than what you value and our willingness to pay is different.
Re:Because information has value (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing was that when I grew up there was a selection of newspapers, and you picked one (or at most two). Investigative journalism was probably always a loss leader, you filled the rest up with cheap world news, local information that people more than willingly offer and got "free" money on stuff like announcing happenings or schedules, second hand market listings, obituaries and lots of other things that people wanted to put in the paper. You more or less had to have all the bits or people would pick a different newspaper.
Today, I can jump from one online site to the next on a story-by-story basis. Craigslist and eBay and lots of other companies will cherry-pick the lucrative bits and do pure sites based on that. World news? I can get those at the lowest bidder worldwide, being global and all. Before actually there was a value in getting a paper that'd tell you about the earthquake in Japan, today there 2342643 sites willing to tell you about it. So when you get everything else where it's cheapest, investigative journalism has to be its own profit center. The stories they make actually have to sell more than they cost to produce, there's no halo of additional income like there used to be.
That's tough. You see many magazines still do well because they cater to niches. Some financial newspapers still do good, because it's vital the information is fresh and analysis good. The other case is that the other newspapers aren't selling yesterday's news anymore. If an investigative journalist "blows the lid" on a case at 9 AM in one newspaper, by 10 AM all the others will have called someone for comment and made their own arguably legitimate news reporting and by the time it hits the evening news they'll pretty much all have an equally broad covering. So all you get is to work hard then throw it to the sharks who'll all grab their own piece while hopefully still sending a bit of the viewers to your own site. As a vital institution of society it's important, as a business model I'd run for the hills.
Re:Because information has value (Score:4, Interesting)
All good points. I wish they had introduced a fourth option, which could have been like how automatic toll payments work in the SF Bay Area (and probably elsewhere, dunno). I put in a "retainer" amount of some value (say $20). When that amount drops to below a certain value, the system automatically "tops" me back up to the max amount (the toll system is slightly more dynamic than this but you get the idea).
If I could put $20 in escrow with NY Times, I'd happily do so. Every time I read an article they could ding me $.25 or something. When I run out of article credits they top my account up by auto-charging again. I don't think many institutions could get me to subscribe in this way but NY Times is definitely one of them.
I think internet models are most profitable when they are monthly subscriptions but they lose a lot of customers who don't want a monthly fee for something they use irregularly. Amazon is basically taking those customers in the internet rental business - Netflix charges subs, and Amazon charges per rental. I wish NY Times had introduced a per rental model *in addition* to the ones they did announce, for people like me who like the service but don't use it regularly enough to justify a monthly sub.
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I've got free news from:
That's what you think. When something is free, it's always necessary to question who is paying the cost, and how. What are you giving up in exchange for your 'free' news? At the very least, the vast majority are giving up significant information about their reading and browsing habits.
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I would tell you who is paying for my news, but I have adblock installed so I don't see the advertisements.
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No, it doesn't, but it stops well in excess of 99%. I am far more surprised when I do see an ad than when I don't. I'd call that "good enough". I don't care for the hassle of trying to keep an updated hosts file.
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What has NYT got that I can't get elsewhere for free?
Exactly! Since you KNOW that all the urgent hot breaking news stories will show up here on Slashdot only about a week after they happen.
G.
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I'm confused. Why would I ever want to pay for news?
I've got free news from: cnn.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, bbc.uk, new radio, various news apps on my smartphone, and tens of thousands of idiotic commentary available to me across the web.
What has NYT got that I can't get elsewhere for free?
Obtaining news from multiple different sources, especially if somewhat random, has problems.
Obviously there's questions over the quality of your news source. Obviously very poor with the idiotic commentary like at fox news, but I still haven't found any free news source that is as good as an actual paper. Even if the source actually has a physical paper, they seem to put drafts online (in order to be quick) which are later amended once the editor has had a run at it. There's also often lots of crap that nev
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Paul Krugman.
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I'm confused. Why would I ever want to pay for news?
While you can certainly get breaking headlines anywhere on the web, those that subscribe to newspapers usually want a whole package that isn't available for free via the web. I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, and I like the culture section, which is as good as any paper in the world. I like their editorial content and letters section, and of course, they have the best business and financial coverage anywhere (though the Investors Business Daily folks would argue that point).
If you just want "latest he
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oh of course I have. I have to make a concerted effort not to read the comments on articles, because the level of stupidity of my fellow countrymen angers me to no end. Often the article itself is not much better. That said, that's just journalism in the 21st century (Really, it's been that bad since the late 80s at least). Any of these sources will stop the stupidity when something of actual importance happens. nobody was reporting on lindsay lohan on september 11th 2001.
That said, they're just doing what
Expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
But $15/mo for the entry level? That's really disappointing. There are many readers that will not be able to afford this. I was hoping the entry level would be closer to the $5/mo mark.
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In my opinion nytimes.com is one of the best sources of journalism
Based on other comments, it seems you should consider re-examining the basis for your opinion, since they seem to indicate that the proper term is "used to be", not "is".
on the web
Even on the web, given that it is a superset of what is available through traditional media channels.
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My view on this is as follows: I pay netflix $10 a month for 1 DVD at a time and free unlimited online play. If I can't get more value then that in an online subscription, I don't get it.
Frankly the amount of content available on the NYTimes is not worth $15 a month for me. I would be willing to spend $5 a month, and that's iffy.
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If they are to stupid to make enough money to not be able to afford $15/Mo....
Hmmm....how much intelligence does it take to make enough money to *not* be able to afford $15 month?
RefControl (Score:3)
Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit.
That's good to know... the referer header is easy to forge.
Increased productivity (Score:5, Funny)
This is a great way to get me to stop reading the NYT at work. Now, if only Slashdot would do the same thing I might actually get some work done.
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Feel free to send me $15/mo to continue reading Slashdot. I'll even throw in access to Google News.
Canada first? WTF? (Score:2)
They are launching the pay wall in Canada first, effective immediately.
Everything time something "good" rolls out from the USA (Hulu, iPhone, iPad, lots of shit from Amazon), it takes forever for it to get to Canada, if it gets here at all. Now this (definitely not "good") and they launch it in Canada first. Go figure.
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But Canadians are Americans also
how can a fact be a troll?
Good question - are Slashdot moderators *that* ignorant about geography? When I look at my map of North America, I see the country of Canada up on the northern part of the continent -- doesn't that make Canadians Americans the same way that people from Nigeria and Zimbabwe are both Africans even if they are from different countries?
Just because the people of the USA call themselves "American" doesn't mean that Canadians, Mexicans, Brazillians, etc are not Americans.
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But Canadians are Americans also
how can a fact be a troll?
Good question - are Slashdot moderators *that* ignorant about geography? When I look at my map of North America, I see the country of Canada up on the northern part of the continent -- doesn't that make Canadians Americans the same way that people from Nigeria and Zimbabwe are both Africans even if they are from different countries?
Just because the people of the USA call themselves "American" doesn't mean that Canadians, Mexicans, Brazillians, etc are not Americans.
The reason people from "the USA" call ourselves Americans is that the "A" stands for "America". Canada does not have the word "America" in its name. Mexico does not have the world "America" in its name. etc.
Browser Addons (Score:2)
So, wont we soon have browser addons to add referrers to the links to make use of this loophole??
'Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles
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We already do. It's called RefControl [mozilla.org].
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We already do. It's called RefControl.
So far I have the following sites set to always get a referrer of "http://google.com/"
nytimes.com
wsj.com
ft.com
I've done it because at one point or another all of those sites have blocked access to some article with the default referrer but let my in with the spoofed referrer.
I also block all cookies associated with those sites too.
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If you know the headline of the article, you can presumably just search for it, then click the link in the search engine, and not even bother faking anything.
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No ads, right? (Score:2)
Will the subscription come without ads, or perhaps at least without any ads you would not see in the newspaper? Doubtful of course, but I'm not going to pay that kind of subscription fee and still be blinked at.
Unionize (Score:2)
Will the subscription come without ads, or perhaps at least without any ads you would not see in the newspaper? Doubtful of course, but I'm not going to pay that kind of subscription fee and still be blinked at.
Hear, hear!
On the bright side, $15/mo is a relatively big stick that we can wield to make demands about the quality of both the content and the user interface. As it stands now, we have no economic leverage aside from the nanoamount of ad revenue that NYT will lose if you or I stop reading their rag online.
But as paying customers, we can actually demand changes. Stop showing blinky ads. Stop adding annoying user interface controls that no one asked for. Stop running stories that are obviously paid-for PR pl
Too much? (Score:2)
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How are you going to get the proper article link to link it?
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Workaround (Score:2)
How long until someone crawls the NYT site and links all the stories from their Facebook account? What recourse would the NYT have, since they obviously have the capability to block this but have chosen not to?
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I received their notice (Score:2)
but you know what? I don't care because they're already irrelevant. They lost relevance around the time they staffed people like Judith Miller, Adam Nagourney, and Jayson Blair. Do I want to know something real? Well, in English I turn to the BBC. Because I also speak those languages, Der Spiegel and Le Monde as well.
For everything else, I read eyewitness reports. And why shouldn't I? Media channels like the NYTimes long ago spun down their foreign operations. They rely on eyewitnesses too, same as
Can't I just delete my cookies for free access? (Score:2)
Their site says:
Yes, NYTimes.com visitors can enjoy 20 free articles each calendar month as well as unrestricted access to browse the home page, section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds
Unless they make visitors register (which doesn't seem to be the case, I just read a few articles without registering), then if I just delete my nytimes.com cookies can't I keep going back for unlimited free articles? Even if I have to register, I can just use multiple email addresses - gmail makes that trivial, I can have "myname+nytimes1@gmail.com, myname+nytimes2@gmail.com, etc. and they all go to my inbox.
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Even if I have to register, I can just use multiple email addresses - gmail makes that trivial, I can have "myname+nytimes1@gmail.com, myname+nytimes2@gmail.com, etc. and they all go to my inbox.
Ya know, there might be *someone* in the IT dept there who could figure out how to ignore everything after the + on a gmail address.
Of course, anyone that smart would probably want to let you get away with it.
After all, this whole "paying for news" thing sounds like a Stupidity Trap, avoidable by anyone who is even a little bit clever.
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Even if I have to register, I can just use multiple email addresses - gmail makes that trivial, I can have "myname+nytimes1@gmail.com, myname+nytimes2@gmail.com, etc. and they all go to my inbox.
Ya know, there might be *someone* in the IT dept there who could figure out how to ignore everything after the + on a gmail address.
First, it's not even clear that I *have* to register with a valid email address, but even if they caught on to my gmail plus sign scheme, then I can just sign up for multiple gmail accounts and I can forward them all into a single account. Or use one of the remailing services mentioned by other another poster.
Maybe it's easier to read than Slashdot (Score:2)
I love the new york times (Score:2)
I think paying $360/year to read it on my iPhone and iPad is an absolute bargain.
Who's with me?
Price perspective (Score:3)
Their quality is generally good. I sometimes don't agree with their editorials - but the cost is *WAY* too high. Continuing to access it the way I do - from multiple devices - I would pay $35/month or $420/year. Nearly the cost of a new iPad each year or even a 0.99/app each and every day all year long. Nooo... I don't think so.
Isn't the times the paper that told us (Score:2)
4 weeks != month (Score:2)
Seems like everybody in the media and quite a few here on Slashdot are not understanding the $15 for 4 weeks is not the same thing as $15 for a month. The tradition understanding of a 'month' is 12 months per year. There are 13 '4-week-months' in a year, not 12.
52 / 4 = 13 'months'
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Democrats good, Republicans bad.
You can send my $2.50 a month to Japan red cross. Thank you very much.