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.
Duh. (Score:4, Interesting)
Cue "OMFG They're so irrelevant!" whiners.
Frankly, it's about time. They spend millions a year to produce a product (written news stories) and they have two delivery formats for said product: One, a pay product printed on dead trees, which accounts for the vast majority of their revenue. And two, a free digital product that doesn't make shit, with the added bonus that it makes their paying product worthless.
Seems like a no-brainer. Now, the question becomes, will they charge a fair price, or will they pull a record company move, and try to charge the same for a physical and a digital product?
One thing is for sure. If it works out for them, you're going to see tons of print outlets following suit.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 inte
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I think they should charge per section while offering a discount if you want access to everything. While I don't read the Times, if I did I know that I would likely be ignoring half of it (style sections, etc.) That way, they can truly see how much revenue each section brings in and I don't have to pay for something I won't read.
Thoughts?
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I'd be more interested in cheap, short subscriptions (say, $0.25 for 12 hours).
That would work out to a pretty pricey annual rate, but it would fit the way I access their content.
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Re:Duh. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the cost of a daily print subscription to the New York Times is 14.80...For a week. Mind you, that's to my house, and I live a long fucking way from NYC (checked it against my old NYC zip code, and it's only 11.70 there).
So, given that the bitch costs 800 bucks a year for us plebes who don't live in New York, and only around 600 for the pricks who do, I'm guessing that 50 bucks a year would be a bit of a steal. =P
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The 1,000,665 people who pay for it every weekday, and the 1,438,585 people who pay for it every sunday probably would disagree with your assertion.
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When I subscribed to a paper newspaper, I subscribed to it because of the convenience (mainly portability), not necessarily because of the quality of the stories.
Now that I have a web tablet, I don't subscribe to a physical newspaper, and I don't miss it.
Lots of people don't have web tablets, so I can see that being a deciding factor for them still.
Quantity of readership doesn't mean much w.r.t "quality" when other factors are involved, or have the lessons of McDonald's and Windows been totally lost on you?
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You mean people don't want to hear opinions presented as facts? Huh...sounds like Fox News has us fooled -_-
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But they're too big to fail! How will people live without their news!
If this move fails, its time for a bailout.
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The problem is that the "pay product printed on dead trees" was losing subscribers at a steady pace before they started producing the free digital product.
What I've found curious about this whole issue is that nearly all the commentary and discussions I've heard or read about it has settled on the problems of newspapers. It's as if they think that people have bought newspapers because they want the cheap, cruddy paper, and the news printed on it is just incidental decoration.
I've even heard/read a few disc
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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 nowad
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.
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They tried to do it...in 1995. Big deal. No one cared about the internet version then. It wasn't a viable delivery platform for 95% of the world.
Now, things have changed. People pay fees for internet sites all the time. It's that stupid 5 dollars a month to Pandora, or wherever, for "premium" content.
Shrug. I think we're already seeing plenty of papers folding. The mistake you're making is thinking that what pops up to take their place is going to keep generating free content. That model just doesn't work.
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It's that stupid 5 dollars a month to Pandora, or wherever, for "premium" content.
I've found that I can switch to last.fm when my Pandora time runs out each month, so there's no need to pay Pandora. (Or I *gasp* listen to my bought music.) I like Pandora for the music they've brought me, sure, and I show that by giving them referrer credit on every Amazon MP3 purchase.
I've asked them to find a way to track referrer credits, but they don't have the capability to do so right now.
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Now I already pay $45 per month for the new delivery medium (my cable internet connection), so I feel justified to expect some free content to come with that.
You're reading that free content. Consider these premium news sites to be more like HBO.
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You're paying $45 for the "new delivery medium", but that's not paying for any news to go with it unless they stated that in your contract. News is paid for by subscriptions and/or advertising. What you're paying for in your internet connection is the dead-tree equivalent of reams of blank paper. It's up to you to find something to fill that paper. No one else is obligated to give you anything to fill it.
Digital content should be somewhat less expensive than the dead tree counterpart, but unless you can
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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 an
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They tried to do it...in 1995. Big deal.
Actually, their last attempt to construct a pay wall was called TimesSelect, and debuted in Sept. 2005. (see wiki page [wikipedia.org]). They abandoned it after only lasted two years, until Sept. 2007. How much have "things changed" since then?
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: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.
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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: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: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.
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You may call them "whiners", but they have a point. Why would I pay for content that I can get for free anywhere else? Why would I pick the NYTimes over any of the free sources of similar information? You are forgetting who the customer is in regards to news. The customer is the advertiser. How much are you paying for your network news exactly (not that I personally watch the news, but still)?
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Why would I pay for content that I can get for free anywhere else?
That's the whole point of the New York Times model - they do provide original content and in-depth reporting. Columnists, sure, but that's not really the value for most readers. What you typically find on "news aggregator" recycle-AP-news-endlessly sites is a basic "what happened" account. The NYT hires many of the best reporters in the business and gives them the time and resources to write longer analysis pieces that seek to provide context, explain what's happening behind the scenes and what it may mean
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What you typically find on "news aggregator" recycle-AP-news-endlessly sites is a basic "what happened" account.
For better or for worse, that basic "what happened" account is all that most people really give a shit about. That level of content is fine under ad support, and since most people want that, then it will survive.
For any product you can have a luxury version and a mere functional version. The luxury version will ONLY survive if there are sufficient customers willing to pay extra for it. I just don't see the customers being there for pay news sites. If NY Times goes pay I suspect that within 15 years they
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You may call them "whiners", but they have a point. Why would I pay for content that I can get for free anywhere else? Why would I pick the NYTimes over any of the free sources of similar information? You are forgetting who the customer is in regards to news. The customer is the advertiser. How much are you paying for your network news exactly (not that I personally watch the news, but still)?
And you're forgetting that the NYT typically has better reporting, based on many criteria, than any other news outlet in the US, which is why it might be reasonable for the reader to pay for it, and why there really isn't another free source to replace it. Furthermore, while advertising provides substantial revenue for the NYT, if advertising were sufficient to cover all production costs, the NYT wouldn't be seeking revenue from their readers.
Personally, I'd be much happier paying full price for my news an
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The problem is that to continue to do business revenue must be greater than expenses. The question is how well prepared is the New York Times to balance subscription
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The problem lies with intangibles like dwell time. Advertisers want you to spend a lot of time looking at their ad, building up that good old submliminal crap.
A newspaper ad is an ad placed in a product that someone desires so much that they've actually paid for it. A product that will lie around the home for a while thereafter, generating additional brain time.
Contrast that with a web page ad. Might not even see it, if you use ad blocking software. Even if you click through, you may immediately decide you
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.
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Do they still provide value, absolutely, bu
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.
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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.
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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.
Why would you prefer a model where you pay $60 per year and you have a decide on a click-by-click basis if you want to spend the money over a model where you pay $50 per year and can read whatever you want on a whim?
That is the fundamental problem with micropayment schemes. Having to make all of those micro-decisions. In theory, it should be 100 times easier to make a one penny decision than a one dollar decision, but it's not. As the per-decision monetary cost goes down, it quickly becomes dominated by the per-decision cognitive effort cost. Free works because there is no cost decision to be made. Almost-free quickly becomes too annoying to bother with.
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To be honest, I stopped reading NY Times articles when you started having to sign in. I haven't been back since. I get most of my news from the BBC and CBC websites. Don't tell either, but I'd probably pay a monthly subscription for their sites.
The Problem is in the Implementation (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm okay with paying for the New York Times. I agree the quality of their articles makes it worth it. Lengthy, well-researched content costs money to produce, and people like myself and the rest of the Internet thrives on the professionally-produced news. Without it, Slashdot and my blog would have much less to link to.
Where I am against this is the implementation. New Scientist magazine and the WSJ have both gone the metered/subscription route. So if I want to access their content, that's two sets of us
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Frankly, it's about time. They spend millions a year to produce a product
Hell Half of what they use isn't produced by them,
It is produced by the AP and Rewritten or Direct Copyposta from the AP.
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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.
Subscribing to turn off ads (Score:2)
This "free/paid-for" model absolutely extends to web operations.
I disagree. As I understand it, people who pay for text on the Internet expect, as a condition of such payment, not to see animated advertisements alongside that text.
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They charge to offset the hilariously expensive printing and delivery process. The "having paying customers to show to our advertisers" angle is just a bonus.
In other news.... (Score:2)
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The New York Times sees a massive drop in readership. What the market is actually willing to provide with advertisements wasn't good enough for them...
Indeed. It reminds me of a friend of mine a few years back. He was unemployed at the time (not eligible for unemployment) and had no income whatsoever - nor did he really have any marketable skills. He kept applying to jobs that he wasn't qualified for and getting no results. At one point I kind of nicely suggested that, for a while, he try to get a job at a fast-food place or in retail or something. That was beneath him though. "That won't even pay my bills!" he shouts. Apparently he preferred to hav
Decentralize Me! (Score:3, Interesting)
If I subscribe to paper version? (Score:4, Interesting)
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If they don't it will be pretty greedy.
You say that as if they're offering a public service and the management is trying to skim a little of the top for themselves. The fact is, they're a publicly traded company (or are owned by one) and have a responsibility to the share-holders to make as much money as possible. Why would you ever expect a company to not make the most money possible within the confines of ethical business practice?
The question is simply whether an online pay system will work. The product is certainly of high quality but ad rev
Plenty of other sources (Score:2)
There are plenty of other sources of free (decent) content available on the internet, at least of similar quality. Obviously, we'll see what the market thinks of all this.
Of course, I'm sure it will be trivial to game the website anyhow.
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There are plenty of other sources of free (decent) content available on the internet, at least of similar quality. Obviously, we'll see what the market thinks of all this.
Of course, I'm sure it will be trivial to game the website anyhow.
Regarding "gaming the website", why scheme to illegitimately obtain what you can legitimately obtain for free? It's not like news is difficult to obtain. If the NY Times had anything like a monopoly on news sources, this move would make a lot more sense. As it is, it seems their goal is to enrich the advertising revenues of competitors who offer no-charge news sites with ads.
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Actually, there are only a handful sources of similar content of similar quality, and the two that immediately spring (WSJ and the Economist) are behind pay walls.
God knows the NYT has its flaws (WMD and Whitewater, as high-profile examples), but in terms of original national (US) reporting it's way above the AP or the BBC. I think the WSJ is (was?) better, but their big stories (Enron, back-dating options, Vioxx, for example) are obviously business related. McClatchy seems to have an edge documenting iss
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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.
Do they seriously think they'll cover their costs? (Score:2)
That they'll make a hojillion dollars [penny-arcade.com] more than they'll lose in setting up and maintaining their paywall, and in reduced advertising revenue from all the eyeballs that they'll lose?
Really? That's some serious hubris they're pitching there.
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.
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Their global page shows less of that focus:
http://global.nytimes.com/ [nytimes.com]
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If you're not in New York, then why bother going on?
But se
Key Details (Score:5, Funny)
Occasional users will still get free access to a certain number of articles per month. Most of the key details are not yet determined
Wait, is that key details in the ARTICLE?
Scientists warn of a deadly meteor that will hit the earth in 3 days striking the state of (register to read more)
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?
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]
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I have access to so much high-quality news and editorial information for free that it's hard to justify paying for more information that doesn't have much to differentiate itself except the name of the source.
What makes the New York Times worth paying for that I can't find from 100 or 1000 free sources via news.yahoo.com or news.google.com?
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If the money isn't coming out of my wallet, then for all I care, it is free.
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So what you are saying is I should always joyfully pay for newspapers, because I'll have to pay more for widgets otherwise.
Right. That sold me.
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Re:A word of thanks and a request (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod parent up! :)
Seriously, people here love to talk about how the "new economy" makes it possible to remove "artificial scarcity" and make it so everything is free.
What these people ignore is that, even if it costs no money to copy something, it still costs money to create something. There is still, in this "new economy", the very real economics that the majority of content people use (Computer programs, movies, music, television programs, written articles, etc.) is content that would not exist if someone wasn't being paid to make it.
I enjoy reading all of the articles on the New York Times' front page [nytimes.com] every morning, and understand I soon may need to pay for the privilege of reading the quality journalism and writing the the NYT offers.
Now, I'm sure someone will point to open source software and say "Mr. MaraDNS, you don't know about open source software and how this proves that we can have all the compelling content we want for free in the 'new economy'". I will point out to people who think like this that I am, in fact, a developer of open-source software [maradns.org].
People who think open-source software (OSS) makes it possible for all content to be free don't understand how OSS changes the relationship between the developer and the user. A lot of people think an OSS program is like a commercial program, but free, and that they can ask for features or get support for free, and it gets pretty tiring to have people email me asking for free support, even though I make it clear that I don't provide free email support for my program [samiam.org].
The thinking behind OSS is that I donate some of my coding time and effort to the greater community. In return, people are free to contribute bug fixes or improvements to the program, or supply support on the mailing list. For example, someone wanted better IPv6 support, supplied patches, and now MaraDNS has good IPv6 support. Another person wanted better Windows service support, and supplied patches to make MaraDNS' new recursive core be a full Windows service. Other people answer user's questions on the mailing list or translate documentation. Webconquest [webconquest.com] very generously provides me a free Linux shell account and hosting for the web site.
Likewise, I found an OSS Doom random generator I liked and provided bug fixes and improvements to it [samiam.org]; when I lost interest in it, another person became the maintainer and improvements continue to be made even though I no longer work on that code. And, there is a Free Windows Civilization clone [c-evo.org] for Windows which I have provided a bug fix and extended the documentation with [samiam.org].
OSS doesn't mean we have the right to demand all content be free or are justified in pirating media and software. OSS means that we can, together, make free content which complements the for-pay content out there.
Re:A word of thanks and a request (Score:4, Informative)
Publishers don't create....
The older I get, the more I appreciate the hard work of the editors who fix most of my errors and the sales team that collect the money from the advertisers and subscribers. They create an environment that helps me, the nominal creator and the only one who gets a byline, produce something that's better.
Now it may be that the market will decide that they don't want to pay extra for these layers. That's a decision that all of us will make consciously or unconsciously when we decide what content we want to consume. But there's no doubt that they do something.
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I think this is the great information age challenge; how do content producers (and I am not necessarily talking about the publishers here but potentially the 'artist' themselves - more on that in a following paragraph) receive compensation and how do I as a consumer support them. This is not a new topic since single sign on and micro-payments have been a topic discussed for quite a few years.
Personally I would like to support the creators of content, however, bulk payment (i.e. monthly subscriptions) just
Re:A word of thanks and a request (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks for responding, Mr. Wayner. It's interesting to hear from someone on the inside of this issue. I find that I disagree with a lot of the points you listed in the linked piece. But I find a lot of value in the insight you offer.
Having said that - I had no idea who the heck you were. I had to consult Google to get some indication. I hit Wikipedia to get a bit more insight. With that in mind, I thought giving your piece a look was worthwhile. If any of that was locked behind paywalls, I would have zipped along on my merry way, dismissing you out of hand as yet another curiosity that I don't have the motivation to pursue over the boundaries set before me.
How supporting you as an author while not putting up too great a boundary works... well... now, that is the question, isn't it? It'll be interesting to watch (in so far as train wrecks invoke a certain facination). But I don't believe the NY Times has the answer.
I should note that my interest is a little more than average freeloading consumer of information. My father is a noted author in his small field. But he has always had to struggle with the economics of that activity. It has always been difficult to make money doing what he does - at least on his niche subject matter. He has a current project that ran in to a dead end with the traditional publishing route and we are currently looking at a more open tactic (open publishing of the bulk of the project linked with paid references, teaching aids, and speaking engagements). I hope my fascination with my father's project isn't the aforementioned train-wreck variety; only time will tell. But I do know that traditional strategies / pay walls have only served my father so far.
Re: (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
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."
This is not so bad (Score:2)
And for those who love the paper, and want to read it, but hate to pay(I am talking about those who read it
The grey lady should look before leaping (Score:5, Interesting)
Slate did this, the NYT should talk to their management about lessons learedn.
They used to be a popular well read site that decided that a paywall was the way to, regardless of what their readers told them. They later added an interactive ad that you had to get through as a means of allowing people to visit without paying. By the time the word they changed back to an ad based site for free the damage was done. By then it was too late and a fair part of their user base had been alienated and simply moved on.
How many people would be surprised that Slate is no longer a pay site, and you can simply read it without any hoops? I would imagine a fair number of people as they probably haven't visited the site in years. For the meanwhile, the damage has been done and Slate is a shadow of their former self.
I've said before, and I'll say it again, the news is a commodity, if you want visitors you have to differentiate yourself against Reuters and the Associated Press. You can either do that with original reporting and or a better experience. Adding a paywall only works with a substantial investment in one or both, witness the Wall Street Journal which has original repoorting of high quality for an example and has been behind a paywall for years.
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:The grey lady should look before leaping (Score:5, Informative)
Slate did this, the NYT should talk to their management about lessons learedn.
You make a number of valid points. However, I believe that you're talking about Salon.com [guardian.co.uk]. Slate is and (with possibly some limited exceptions I'm not aware of) an advertising-supported site that still gets tons of links and traffic.
On a more substantive note, two things: (1) stories will still be free to users who read only a few per month, which helps to avoid the Salon.com problem. (2) It doesn't take effect until 2011 which means they still have time to abandon the whole thing if advertising revenues tick upwards.
I still think it's a rotten idea.
Re: (Score:3)
Aggregation (Score:2, Interesting)
Some people will pay, most won't (Score:3, Funny)
The fact of the matter is that most people when compelled to pay, will simply move their viewing elsewhere. As long as there are places to get news online free of charge, pay-walls won't work for the masses. I guess the next step of course, once the pay-walls have gone up, is to claim copyright over any and every story to prevent publication in blogs!
Four words: (Score:2)
"Good luck with that!"
I try to avoid the NYTimes website as much as possible since there are so many other available resources that are IMO better.
If the NYT was more specialized it could work (Score:2)
What the analysis is probably missing is that, like many people, although I am subscribed to The Economist, the FT AND the WSJ:
- 1 - I am more or less forced to read these since it is a part of my job
- 2 - The average reader of these magazines is earning more money
Paynews failed in Canada already (Score:2)
It's all about advertising (Score:3, Interesting)
As this article at The Atlantic [theatlantic.com] points out, the NY Times makes more money from subscriptions than from advertising. If they can get enough money from subscribers then they don't need to worry about page rank, hits, click-throughs, etc.
Workaround? (Score:2)
I'm curious how they intend to implement this. A workaround might be as simple as deleting some cookies, a trip to bugmenot, or using a leaked university / company-wide password.
Why the WSJ Online is hurting their customers (Score:4, Interesting)
1> Added advertising for paid subscribers. 2> Confused what is free and what is paid for. This is a never ending moving target. It is very confusing when you try to share something with non-subscribers. 3> Huge price increases at renewal time that I have to renegotiate over the phone. 4> They throw their video content on the home page, which you go to about 20 times a day. On laptops I use all day in an office environment, I have volume muted so do not benefit from this. Yet, it freezes Firefox while it downloads the content for about 20-30 seconds every time I click on the home page. I've asked them to remove it, to no avail. 5> Announced that blackberry access will no longer be included with regular online access. Separate fee required. This, to me, is the straw that is breaking the camels back, and why I will unsubscribe as soon as this goes into effect.
It is sad to see the NYT follow the WSJ's lead in this. I'm willing to pay for content, but they really do need to find a model that works and stick with it instead of changing it every 3 months. They are pushing long-time paying customers like me away.
Erik
Re:Why would it be a shame? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not a matter of being the most reliable; it's a reliable, content-generating, influential news source.
A very small percentage of our summaries link to the NYTimes. Regardless, we're always disappointed when a site we occasionally link turns into a pay site. Some stories we can pick up elsewhere, some we can't.
The bigger problem is that it's one less source -- not just a link target, but a source -- that provides tech news. And other sites are assuredly watching and taking cues from the NYT, the WSJ, etc., to see how they can either turn a profit or turn a bigger profit. A drop in the bucket, perhaps, but enough drops will fill the bucket. As more and more sites put up paywalls, news junkies will have less free news to read.
On the other hand, nobody reads the linked articles anyway, so maybe it's not so bad!
Re: (Score:2)
An even smaller percentage of the summaries link to the NYTimes with its "registration required" deal when no other news source that covers the story was available. I know there are ways around that registration requirement, but that isn't really my point.
As opposed to Fixed News (Score:2)
The New York Times - All The News That Fits, We Print
As opposed to News Corporation - When News Breaks, We Fix It. (Why else would MSNBC's Keith Olbermann call it Fixed News?)
Re: (Score:2)
Why not both? I don't trust Drudge or any of that other crap you were talking about, but they do admittedly break the story first. I'll wait to make up my own mind until I read the high-quality nuanced story from the New York Times, or another quality newspaper. They'll reliably talk about the context of the issue, or implications for other news.
That, and the NYTimes is pretty damn fast. I read the article about the GOP winning Massachusetts a full 12 minutes after the race was conceded.
Re: (Score:2)
1. The internet is too slow at lunchtimes, what with everyone and their dog buying package holidays at the moment.
2. I can't take this PC to Trap 1, but the paper opens nicely.
3. I sit staring at this bloody LCD all day, getting away from it for 30 minutes is bliss.
4. I'd get the sack for look at Page 3 tits on the internet.
5. People borrow my paper and chat about the content afterwards. It's nice. Nicer than a link in an email.
Re: (Score:2)
The New York Times is a decent paper in a time of mediocre papers. It would still
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"I don't read Newspapers, I read the news on the internet", and mentioned that all the news stories of the day have been driven by sites like Drudge, LittleGreenFootballs and Daily Kos, and Huffington Post, not by NYT or Washington Post.
The traditional "National News Media" is fast becoming irrelevant, because information dissemination is faster than a Newspaper can be printed.
Information is moving (literally) at the speed of light (Internet). By the time NYT puts it on the front page, it is often 24 hours too late to be of much use.
What you're describing applies almost exclusively to celebrity gossip and irrelevant political rumors. News that doesn't matter after 24 hours tends not to be real news. At best you get early results of elections or public announcements. Real reporting isn't simply a list of the obvious facts given by a single source. It means checking the source, describing differing viewpoints and evaluating those sources, and providing a reader with real insight, not just information. Real reporting still has its pl