New York Times Halves Monthly Free Article Views To Ten 178
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times has announced that, starting in April, visitors to NYTimes.com will only be able to access 10 free articles a month, down from 20 articles currently. The NYTimes paywall was put into effect last year, and seems to have been a success, with nearly half a million digital subscriptions to all of Times Co.'s websites; this despite the fact that the paywall is trivial to circumvent (for example, by deleting all cookies from nytimes.com)."
The submitter included a link to the WSJ article on the change, which appears to also be paywalled.
Oh Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh Well (Score:5, Informative)
"If people don't like it they can get their news somewhere else or buy a subscription. This is how the market is supposed to work."
Or they could just delete the cookie and read on.
Re:Oh Well (Score:5, Informative)
I just open all NYT and WSJ articles in "incognito mode" or whatever it's called on your favorite browser.
I like to think of it as a game, where you lose one life each time you accidentally click on an article without opening it in incognito mode. If you lose all 10 lives, you "lose" the game and can't read good journalism for the remainder of the month.
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You could just configure your browser to nuke all cookies on close. You can even whitelist specific cookies (like login tokens) if logging back into sites gets annoying, though with saved passwords it's not really that annoying.
The only thing I use incognito mode with is for online banking, though I'm effectively incognito anyway, since my chromium install has the no history addon, doesn't have flash installed, has the cache set to store in /dev/null, and is set to delete cookies on exit.
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There's a thing in SEO called "bounce rate" which you can choose to use or ignore. There's no official standard definition, but it ranges from 2-30 seconds of viewing time. It's up to the webmaster to decide how to measure this. I'm sure bounce rate is measured differently for ecommerce than it is for news sites. I'm sure their business team looked very carefully at the bounce rate among many other factors and metrics before deciding to drop it down to 10 articles per month. The web is the future of their $
Re:Oh Well (Score:4, Informative)
I know the old exception is quite easy. You could go to NYTimes.com and read 20 articles a month there.
Linked articles from blogs don't count, and neither do articles linked from search engines. The reasoning for this is simple - blogs and search engines bring in viewers. If they stay, they can read 20 more (or 10 now) articles for free on the main site.
Basically, occasional readers (those who read via blogs and such) aren't subject to much paywalling at all.
And that's why the NYTimes paywall is a success where other paywalls failed.
Other paywalls let you read a paragraph or two before demanding payment. NYTimes lets you read the rest for free. If you like it, you may read more until you hit your limit. But you won't hit your limit if you only read NYTimes via another website.
There are enough ways to bypass the paywall that those who really wanted to could (basically by googling the headline and clicking that way), but most people are lazy and having to google to read another article gets old fast.
Basically, NYTimes found a way to get its articles read (via blogs and news aggregators like Google) but still being able to get some money from those who like it enough to read it (by not offering it entirely for free). So it doesn't matter how many times NYTimes articles appear in say, /. since they don't count. But those who wanted to read the NYTimes for free by using its website is blocked.
Pretty brilliant, actually. Blogs and aggregators bring people in, and you only charge them if they stay. First hit's free.
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That's hilarious. I shall have to give this game a go.
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Have you considered subscribing? As you said, it's "good journalism", clearly something you value enough to go to the trouble of gaming the cookie. Perhaps this is something you should be actively rewarding, rather than taking active steps to avoid rewarding?
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I've probably spent $2000 in physical copies of the NYT over the last three years. I usually read them on my lunch break. I have little remorse for what I do.
B&N has a deal where if you buy a year's "digital subscription" to the NYT, you get their e-ink reader for free. I'm looking at buying one of those. No idea if that allows me to bypass their paywall on the PC though.
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If you personally consider it a good journalism, maybe it's time to reward it by buying the subscription?
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Trap sprung, nerd!
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You know, my grocery store recently increased prices on produce despite the fact that it's easy to take stuff off the shelves and run out the door with it... What does the ease of circumvention have to do with it? Some people will steal if they can get away with it, some will pay their share.
Re:Oh Well (Score:5, Insightful)
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LOL @ "stealing".
Tell me, did I sign some kind of a contract with the NY Times where I promise to keep their data on my machine in exchange for their services? Am I "stealing" if I load their results in a browser that doesn't support persistent cookies?
They offer up web pages on a public webserver, and even allow sites like Google to crawl (partnering really, see the robots.txt [nytimes.com]) their site.
You probably think it is "stealing" to block known advertising sites as well.
Re:Oh Well (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually pretty amazing to change your agent string to googlebot and see what opens up for you. For example, all those tech sites that want you to sign up to get an answer suddenly become wide open.
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it's easy to take stuff off the shelves and run out the door with it
I tried taking one of their servers and running out the door, but the power cord got stuck in the elevator. That thing is heavy, by the way; I had to bring my own handcart. Sure, I asked to borrow theirs, but nooooo. And... security guards were mean to me.
So. Your analogy is a bit flawed. Maybe this will help, from Steven Wright:
Last time I went to the movies I was thrown out for bringing my own food. My argument was that the concession stand prices are outrageous. Besides, I hadn't had a barbecue in a long time.
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I can read the New York Times print version at the library for free, how is reading it on a library computer and circumventing the paywall any different?
If I steal an orange, the store is out the price they paid for that orange whether or not I would have paid for it and whether or not I eat it. If I circumvent a paywall I would never pay to get past, how is that costing anyone a penny?
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There's a dozen of Greasemonkey scripts for it, too, if that's more to your likings.
Thing is, I think most of the NYT's audience doesn't know any of this stuff, so it's obvious that they just don't care if 0.1% of their readers can bypass the filter.
Can't RTFA (Score:4, Interesting)
If people don't like it they can get their news somewhere else
How many NYTimes.com articles does Slashdot link to per month? Expect a bunch of "can't RTFA" comments that until now had been reserved for the major scholarly journals and WSJ.
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I wonder if you can hit your limit by browsing through coral cache [nyud.net]? Slow as hell, but I guess I'll try it and see.
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Links from other sources (like /. and nytimes emails) are 'soft' counts against your monthly quota.
I thought this applied only to specific other sources, such as Facebook and Twitter, not necessarily Slashdot. Can you link to a page describing these soft counts?
Re:Oh Well (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it's working. I pay for it, not because I can't get around the paywall, but because they provide a product I think is worth the money.
Re:Oh Well (Score:4, Funny)
I pay for it, not because I can't get around the paywall, but because they provide a product I think is worth the money.
Hey, man, you're ruining this thread's neocommunist vibe.
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I find Google search worth a much larger subscription fee, but I'd still think of them as complete idiots if they erected a pay wall.
Re:Oh Well (Score:4, Informative)
I don't pay for it because, while I think the Times' reporting is top-notch, the print side has too much power and keeps the digital version artificially high to prevent poaching. The Kindle version is $20/month and is totally gimped and does not include digital access. Meanwhile the dead-tree edition is about $30/month and comes with unlimited digital access. You can get the dead-tree edition weekday-only for the same price as the Kindle version, and that also includes unlimited digital access.
But this is the best part: just digital access, no Kindle, no dead-tree is... $8.75/week! Yes, $38/month for less product than the dead tree edition. The mind boggles. I refuse to pile up a bunch of unused newspapers just to save $18/month for digital access, so they can pound sand.
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I was just comparing same-level-of-access. Yes, you can get the web and smartphone for just over $16/month ($3.75/week)... of course you can also get the print edition weekly for $3.85/week that comes with the full digital access, so a 10 cent/week difference between the $16 smartphone only and $38/month full access plans, with a free paper thrown in to boot.
Makes no sense unless you consider their print edition trying to hold on for dear life and calling the shots at the marketing level. At the very least,
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You are forgetting the income from ads. According to their annual report, 79% of their ad revenue comes from print. Over half of their total revenue comes from ads. Unless over 40% of their total cost is for printing and distributing, print is still carrying more than it's share of the load. The only solutions for the problem of print going away is to either generate more income from on-line ads (unlikely), have digital subscriptions cost more than print (to offset the loss of ad revenue), or some com
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Had they went to the "printed" edition on eReader, I don't think their ad revenue would have dropped off. Heck, Amazon can afford to sell a Kindle for $30 less for what must be the least obtrusive ad system ever (the "screen saver" when the unit is not in use and a banner on the main menu).
Unless over 40% of their total cost is for printing and distributing, print is still carrying more than it's share of the load.
From their financials: [businessweek.com]
cost of goods sold 957.5
selling general & admin expenses, total 1,006.0
depreciation & amortization, total 116.5
So if you assume that COGS is mostly printing costs and you lump all of
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COGS is probably not 'mostly printing costs'. Their annual report breaks that $957M into:
Raw Materials: $162M
Wages and benefits: $496M
Other: $300M
The $162M is certainly all printing costs. I would think the bulk of the wages and benefits are for the staff (reporters, columnists, editors, etc). I have no idea what is in 'other', but it probably does contain at least some printing and distribution costs as they use outside printers.
They use outside printers (and probably outside delivery), so it is uncl
Then Google should pull them from their news feed (Score:2)
Google should pull any paywalled sites from their feed on Google News.
I don't want to get sent to a pay site, when there are free sites available.
And Google needs to crack down on those journals (mainly medical) giving Google full copies of articles so that they get search traffic and give people a paywall.
That is against Google rules and I report it and suggest others do. (now I just block the sites from my Google search usually)
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Agreed. I used to read the NY Times several times a day. When they put up their paywall, even with the easy workarounds, it dropped off my radar. I even wanted to pay...but at the time (and perhaps they still are) one had to pay extra for each device class you wanted to use...$X for web access, $Y for tablet access and $Z for phone access. This worked out at the time to be something like $50 a month...for a NEWSPAPER.
I've heard claims that this is akin to the PBS model...with a minority of people overpa
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Absolutely. They have to earn money to pay the reporters, electricity, building rent, equipment somehow.
Of course, it's 10 times per month more than I need.
There is a glut of news sources.
We could seriously get by with much less. Due to AP wire services, etc. we basically do anyway. A lot of news is identical in every paper. If the same news is in every paper, why do we need to have 100 different papers?
Why should I care that some random lady in another state 1000 miles away was kidnapped or murdered or
And? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's working for them, that's actually pretty cool. Those who want it pay or circumvent; those who don't move on to other options. '
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the way it's supposed to work?
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It is. But the larger question is, can this model be useful for everybody. You must remember how a lot of people were (and are) of the opinion that this won't work in the long term. NYT has been kind of pigheaded about this... and it's apparently working. For them.
So... can anybody copying this can expect the
Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)
It will work for anybody in a similar position: producing a lot of content that people want to read, and are willing to pay to do so. Since NYT is unlikely to release detailed numbers, the only formula is trial and error to find the right balance between alienating customers and attracting them. (And this move indicates that they're still refining that balance.)
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The summary (and presumably TFA) assert that the paywall is working. If that's the case, why is the NYTimes reducing the number of free articles from 20 to 10? I suppose to get every last bit of subscriber mojo. Another possible explanation is that (subscriptions * X) + ad revenue - dropoff < (subscriptions * Y) + ad revenue.
In any case, the pay wall has NOT been up for a year. The pay wall has only gone into effect starting January 2012.
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Seems to me that they're tuning the parameters. If subscriptions went up by Y when X = 20, what effect does it have when X = 10?
The fact that they're adjusting down instead of up indicates that they've met with better-than-expected success at 20. If they incurred sufficient readership loss at 20, they would have increased it instead of decreased.
Re:And?.. Paywall HAS been up for a year (Score:2)
>In any case, the pay wall has NOT been up for a year. The pay wall has only gone into effect starting January 2012.
WRONG. It was implemented in March 2011. Thank you for playing the game of "shoot off your mouth when you don't know jack shit."
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If "work" means only 454,000 subscribers total, compared to Spotify adding 1.5 million customer to a total of 2.5 mil [theverge.com], or Hulu reaching 1.5 mil customers in a year... I don't think it's working for NYT.
That's 2001 think. How much revenue has Hulu gained from those 1.5 mil customers? Volume doesn't help you if you aren't making an average profit per customer. Lexis Nexis and other such firms have relatively small customer bases, but generate a large amount of revenue per customer. That's 2012 think. At least for the majority of new companies that will still be around in 2016.
"trivial to circumvent" (Score:5, Insightful)
you realize that for most people deleting cookies only from nytimes.com is technically challenging
and even if it isn't, the hassle factor is enough to move people to buy
Re:"trivial to circumvent" (Score:4, Interesting)
And the point is a polite reminder that they can't get enough advertising to cover the cost of the content you want, so if you want the content you should pay them.
There are a lot of ways around the paywall. I don't think they are deeply serious about making it half free, half subscription, because people who don't want to pay really won't, and they may come up with a relatively bad scheme to make the NYT involuntarily free if they can't simply circumvent it. I'd rather those who know just delete cookies, than start doing a daily/hourly torrent dump of my website or something. If you annoy pirates enough they'll come up with such and easy way to pirate that no one will ever pay. The NYT seems to have fairly successfully (for the moment) found a middle ground between getting people to pay, while giving away content to those who absolutely wouldn't pay anyway.
latimes hard to bypass (Score:2)
If "everyone" implements strong paywalls, I'll subscribe to the NYTimes because it is the most valuable.
Re:"trivial to circumvent" (Score:4, Funny)
I just feel sorry for the poor information that just so desperately wants to be free but is destined to live its life trapped behind a paywall.
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"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive."
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As someone who produces information for a living, whether that's research papers, books, source code or the like, I like eating. The fact that the government pays me to write code and papers that can be published for all to see (or at least, anyone who will pay for the journal in some cases) means I'm ok with free. But if I was actually paid per view of a paper, or my lecture notes or something, I'd be out of business very quickly with people not paying.
Newspapers employ a hell of a lot of people in some
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> the hassle factor is enough to move people to buy
I don't know about you, but I'm not in the habit of doing business with people who annoy me. Why would anybody want to reward this kind of behaviour? If the hassle factor is big enough, I'll just go elsewhere; NY Times is not the only source of news in the world and it is not the best. And if all the news sites suddenly decided to make me pay, I can happily live without them altogether.
Good: the writers get paid. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm glad the NYT has found a way to get money for its content. Internet advertising is slowly being recognized as bunk because most of the people spending a lot of time on the internet are not going to buy anything. They're usually retired, young, or unemployed. As a result, the writers aren't going to get paid if the newspaper relies on advertising, and this means that there will be less quality writing for the rest of us. It's better to pay for something and have it be of a higher quality.
The real travesty is that they paid $40 million for that goofball paywall [slashdot.org].
So maybe (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot should post half as many links to NyTimes.com per month?
Already stopped (Score:3)
Already stopped. I see the same from my friends and relatives. You get the weird pop up, then "oh, its just the times, skip to the next article" in the future. If they have 1/2 mil subscriptions, thats great, but realize thats around a third of one percent of the population. Low enough to not have influence on the population anymore.
Its like making a psuedo-news story that I'm now only allowed to buy half the number of Kia cars that I bought in the past. Hmm 0/2 is still 0.
The bad part is they've moved themselves from the "interesting online newspaper" category to being something to avoid and skip over like ExpertSexChange.
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Not sure what your browsing to bring up that kind of link, but I hope you're not skipping ExpertSexChange to go to something like DIYSexChange.
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If they have 1/2 mil subscriptions, thats great, but realize thats around a third of one percent of the population. Low enough to not have influence on the population anymore.
I guess the question is, how does that number compare to the number of paper subscribers they had in the pre-web days (or, for that matter, the number they have now) especially outside NYC and environs? The NYT has an influence out of proportion to the number of people who actually read the thing; it's the "paper of record," the "Gray Lady," and starting out with "The New York Times reports ..." has long been a way to lend a story an air of gravitas.
I suscribe - and I'm annoyed! (Score:3)
So I typically use my "20 free articles a month" rather than login each and every freak'n time. I know, this doesn't exactly rise to the level of suffering that really warrants a post - but it's pretty damn annoying. Going to 10 just makes the site even less user-friendly than it already is. Is it really that hard to develop a login system that works???
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Yeah, it's like writing good software was hard or something.
(I'm looking at YOU Slashdot and your unicode hating attempts at AJAX / Web 2 / whateverthehellyouaredoingthatscrewsupeverybrowserontheplanet coding.)
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I had problems with my login at one point, but it's been pretty bulletproof across 3 computers, an iPad and my iPhone for a couple of years at least.
What annoys me more is the new JavaScript "dynamic" comments engine. I really enjoy the comments on articles and the new system is borderline unusable on the iPad.
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Someone else may be accessing your ID, or there may be something going on with your browsers. I never have to re-login to the times (despite not being a subscriber, I've got a free account from way back when), Safari and the Times seems to work out who I am every time.
Problem with Digital Subscriptions (Score:2)
Since I purchased an iPad, I have started reading more and more of my newspapers and magazines on their apps. I find that the overall experience is just as enjoyable, and the convenience is great. For most of what I generally read there is complimentary digital access for their print subscribers. So, I get both versions and this is fine for weekly or monthly periodicals. However, for newspapers this can be annoying.
When it came to the NYTimes, after they started charging I called to find out about subscript
and (Score:2)
Except for Spinal Tap (Score:2)
And nothing of value was lost. (Score:3)
500,000 subscribers (Score:4, Interesting)
According to a quick Google:
Half a million PAYING subscribers is in line with the number of people with an Iridium satellite phone, the number of people who use MuveMusic on their smartphone, or the number of people who pay to play Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, etc.
I.e. statistically insignificant, especially if you only count the US. I can't name anyone in the above groups, for example, and it's the amount of people Spotify attract in just two months.
I can't remember the last time I saw an NYT article (despite, a few years ago, coming across them all the time online). I certainly can't remember the last time I tried to "bypass" anything to see a website like that. Or the last time I subscribed to any website (I did have a subscription to LWN.net - and Slashdot - at one point but more as a donation to them than providing any benefit to me).
Hell, the last time I actually bought a paper, there *wasn't* a decent online version of any UK paper (but I was still getting all my news from the Internet), and the paper wasn't even for me.
You can try singing about your paywall all you like but the more restrictions you put on non-paywall activities, the more it confirms my suspicion - they know they will die if they don't get more subscription readers, if they aren't already dying. If they were happy and comfortable and making lots of profit, they wouldn't care about the article limit, or they'd raise it, or they'd have "free" versions and "premium" versions and not have to crowbar you into the premium version all the time.
My granddad's generation - who took whatever news was fed to them - would probably be that loyal to a paper, or even a political party, without thinking. Nowadays? If you don't put your news online where I can see it, it won't get seen.
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This move comes 6 days after I sent an email to the NYTimes.com about the paywall. Here's what I wrote:
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This is almost certainly not true in any practical sense.
We are concerned about the cost to consumers, so the cost to produce the copy is not important. What matters is that cost minus the advertising revenue. Advertisements on the web don't make anywhere near as much money for the NYT as ads in the paper. A digital-only subscription does not necessarily bring in more money for them; there is however a shift in the fraction of the cost paid by the reader vs.
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500,000 subscribers would also rank them #8 in the country among print newspapers. #7, actually, if you remove the print edition of the NYT. That's not insignificant. If you add them together I believe they end up #2 or #3.
Well, yes. When you have employees who enjoy getting a paycheck, equipment costs, hosting fees, delivery fees, printing costs, advertising costs, processing costs and more -- yeah, from time to time you need to actua
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500,000 subscribers would also rank them #8 in the country among print newspapers. #7, actually, if you remove the print edition of the NYT. That's not insignificant. If you add them together I believe they end up #2 or #3.
But didn't the NYT include the digital subscription with any print subscription? Therefore you would be counting a fairly large number of people twice.
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>If you paid a journalist $40,000/year (which isn't unreasonable in the grand scheme of things but is not high at all),
$40K a year? In New York? Including expenses? Let me go take a shit I'm laughing so hard.
The fully loaded (ie, including benefits, expenses etc) F-T-E cost for a NYT journalist is closer to $125K average.
Regardless, their paywall model is BS.
The question I have is... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I used to by the paper version. It had ads.
Cost of print subscription cheaper than digital? (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I reading this wrong? It seems that the cost of a print subscription is $3.85 a week but INCLUDES the $35/mo (holy crap that's expensive) digital subscription.
It kind of baffles me 500,000 people paying as much as ISP service for access to a single newpaper? Are they including print subscriptions in that number
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Are they including print subscriptions in that number
Yes, 500k people have some kind of subscription to the NYT. I tried to find a number for the people with online-only subscriptions, but they don't seem to publish that number...
The real question (Score:3)
The real question is whether anyone will notice the NYT going behind a pay wall? I keep hoping Fox News would disappear behind one, but finally had to throw in the towel and install MurdochBlock.
I doubt I'd notice if either one of them disappeared. It's so amusing to watch colonial media struggle with a new frontier.
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Thanks for letting the world know about MurdochBlock. I've just installed it on all my computers, I'm sure it'll make my life a lot less stressful.
Is deleting the NYT cookie considered theft yet? (Score:3)
How long til deleting the cookie they put on your computer equals breaking the lock on their door and stealing their stuff, eh?
Airport Newspaper Economics (Score:2)
Has anyone noticed how newspaper vendors have implemented paywalls around the physical papers. Airport staff, on pain of death, will never leave one flight's passenger's left-behind newspapers for the next flight's passengers. Two readers and the economy would be destroyed. "Protecting our economy" by ensuring inefficiencies remain is why our country doesn't function any more.
Bundling and Boiling (Score:2)
I greatly benefit from the NYT articles I read, but am not willing to pay given that it involves purchasing a subscription bundle rather than paying a per-article charge. Given the number of articles that interest me, a subscription would mean that I'd be paying between $1 and $3 each.
I'm prepared to pay for information services, but want to pick the eyes out of the entire Web, not just a single site. As one of the top sites, the NYT may be successful forcing its readers to make bundled purchases, but I
Gannett? (Score:2)
More disconcerting to me was mention in a few of these articles that Gannett was going to start implementing paywall's for their papers' sites, too. I don't read the NYT, but my local area paper is a Gannett publication. I don't have time to read a newspaper, digital or print, to make it worth subscribing. But I'll check out the headlines every so often to keep up on what's going on. They already charge for archives and archive anything older than about a week so I'm already locked out of historical thi
Heh (Score:2)
And nothing of value was lost.
I was wondering why I saw no paywall (Score:2)
My cookie monster is running loose.
Just a sign of the times (Score:2)
More and more restrictions on content, best get used to it.
Get Over It Already (Score:5, Insightful)
I pay almost zero attention to east coast media; mostly because they don't pay any attention to the west coast (except for Hollywood).
Yeah and us midwest coast people that read The Star Tribune? We should just totally ignore everything that's happening on the West and East coasts because attention isn't focused on us, the reader, one hundred percent of the time? I shouldn't partake in the enjoyment of the New York Times' excellent book reviews or international coverage because none of those happen to be about me where I live? I shouldn't read the LA Times because even though their 1992 riot coverage won them a Pulitzer, they didn't cover the riots that followed my college hockey team's national championship loss?
Seriously, this East coast/West coast bullshit has got to stop. Get over yourselves and appreciate good news with good factchecking and a budget to send your reporters to be first hand sources.
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You guys do know there are other countries, right? Stuff happens in them all the time that could arguably be called "news" and doesn't involve America at all.
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You guys do know there are other countries, right? Stuff happens in them all the time that could arguably be called "news" and doesn't involve America at all.
Citation please...not from the NYT obviously
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Yes, but for the most part...that news has virtually no effect on the common American's daily life...so we generally don't care that much what else is happening in the world.
It is a large country, and it is easy to grow up here, and never see the majority of our own country, much less see what's outside our borders. Honestly, unless you want to trave
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>> You guys do know there are other countries, right? Stuff happens in them all the time that could arguably be called "news" and doesn't involve America at all.
> Yes, but for the most part...that news has virtually no effect on the common American's daily life...so we generally don't care that much what else is happening in the world.
Actually, a lot of what happens outside of the US has a strong effect on the common American's daily life. For example, most of the things influencing gas prices happ
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Yes, but for the most part...that news has virtually no effect on the common American's daily life...so we generally don't care that much what else is happening in the world.
And if only that were true in reverse.
Sadly, anyone living in the rest of the world has to become familiar with what is going on in the USA, not only because we import most of our entertainment media from the US, but also because the USA tends to export its policies aggressively, via military, diplomatic and economic channels. So that today's NYSE financial trivia or Washington soap opera tends to become tomorrow's drone strikes in Afghanistan or FBI extradition raid in Switzerland or New Zealand. This acce
Re:Get Over It Already (Score:4, Informative)
Everyone's too polite in Canada to make news.
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Before 90s New York Times and the Post were the only sources of real news. They had actual reporters on the field. They were playing the role of both news aggregators (like Reuters/AP) and a paper (with the paper version). Local newspapers then added local content to Times/Reuters/AP news and printed it
Then after internet, their paper business shrunk while their online version did not catch up enough. So NYTimes became a paper with a lot of reporters on the field, but wit
Re: (Score:2)
It could be worse, we don't refer to ourselves as "the real America", nor generally believe that despite his ravaging where we live with tornados on a yearly basis, we've got a direct line to God.
Re:Get Over It Already (Score:4, Funny)
>believe that despite his ravaging where we live with tornados on a yearly basis, we've got a direct line to God.
If most of the people in the South called me on a daily basis, and I had tornado powers, I'd smite them too.
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Sure, there are rumours they still exist, but I see no evidence of it because I refuse to pay.
Yeah, I was shocked when I saw this story here because I hadn't seen anyone link to a New York Times article in a long time and thought they'd gone bust or something.
Re: (Score:2)
You know how people find you on the Web? Links.
You know what happens when you set up a pay wall? People don't link to you because they don't want to force their readers to faff around clearing cookies to read your articles.
As to NYT journalism, weren't they one of the biggest cheerleaders for 'Saddam's WMDs', or am I confusing them with some other newspaper in New York?
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Yup, Tor and Baen books will give you one free book by an author but then you have to buy or scam a download to read the rest. Man, first world life SUCKS!
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Still do in some cases.
I've gotten copies of the Las Vegas Review Journal delivered even when not a subscriber (on a couple of occasions).
Too bad that paper has become so right-wing it is unbearable to read. Just look at their online site and how they keep bashing the Las Vegas Monorail. It was a really good paper before.
And WTF is with Firefox spell check, highlighting the "Las" in "Las Vegas" and "WTF" as spelling errors.
Re: (Score:2)
^ Moocher.
Re: (Score:2)
Heh. Just making a point!