It astonishes me when people think this should be free. KNowledge should be free, yes, but news that costs money and much, much time to acquire and then disseminate _does_ cost money and I'm glad to pay for it.
This is high quality journalism from hard working people: asking them to do it for less and less is ridiculous. Content is tangible, to me at least, and worth money, just as a few lines of code "anybody" could write is also worth quite a bit.
The problem is that this the same dead-tree business model moved to the web. It might appeal to people who consume their information in the classical morning newspaper way but I suspect that is a dwindling market.
People laughed at me then, they laughed at me when I said it again around 2000, and they'll laugh at me now.... but that still doesn't change the fact that it needs to happen, and eventually will.
It could be that the coming wave of tablet/e-reader platforms will be the last piece of the syndication puzzle. It's a safe guess that the New York Times will have someone at the Apple event next week, pitching a subscription deal. If they offer me access to several other major metro papers/special-interest broadsheets along with that NYT subscription, they've got a deal.
Paying $50 for TimesSelect to read the OpEd writers and a few other articles was way too much for me.
I'm an American living in Europe, and the NYTimes is the best place for me to get my American news "fix". The core reporting is what I really value and am happy to pay for.
I think charging or not for their services is definitely the NYTimes's prerogative. That doesn't mean that it's a good choice. Personally, I think it's a bad choice, because they're going to alienate some of their most loyal readers. I, too, wish that the neswpapers could find a sustainable way to remain profitable, but I don't think this is it. But if there is no sustainable way, I guess that means that newspapers actually aren't as valuable to us as we like to think, because otherwise we'd be willing to pay for it.
They're not trying to force anybody to support them. They're changing their business model in order to allow their customers to support them.
Nobody is forcing you to read NYT, if you don't want to pay, don't read it.
(I probably won't be paying, and I disagree with this, but it is their company to do with what they please)
Well, duh. For one, is this cookie-based tracking? I already know how to fix that. Is it sign in tracking? I predict a surge in account sign-ups. Is it IP-based tracking? Say bye to all your AOL users and those behind proxies. Will they force users to install a browser plugin or and ActiveX control or use a FLASH plugin or Silverlight or whatnot? Yeah, that will work for sure.
So, which magical solution do they think they can come up with?
Anyone else thinking this is going to fail quietly in the next few months?
Of course they aren't going to be able to stop people copy/pasting articles to a friend but that generally isn't a problem.
Even if their pay-wall is only 99% effective and a small amount of smart techies manage to get around it for free it really isn't that big of an issue since people that determined to get the content for free never would've paid for it anyway.
I beg to differ, Sirrah!
Also, if you, ah, investigate online porn, you'll find that the on-line porn sites seem to have a gentleman's agreement to not get all huffy if the occasional, incomplete picture set leaks to a free site.
BUUUUUT, since the internet is a dynamic medium, maybe they could offer a tiered pricing scheme (like every other for-pay web app these days) that includes a no ads option. It should be easy enough: just display the print version of the article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.htm...
The Internet delivers a WORLD of news sites meaning the traditional publishers have less of a voice than they did when paper was the sole medium.
Their proposed pay wall may ensnare existing readers, but who in his right mind is going to subscribe having never had a relationship with this provider before? "Oh, you want money for that story, the same story I can see a 1,000 versions of in Google News? Buh-bye."
I'd love to see the evidence that supports this decision. This reeks of someone trying to save his job.
I may be biased though. I grew up delivering and reading the newspaper.
I could cobble together a morning read from other sources. I guess it just depends on their pricing model. I'm willing to listen, at least.
Good content, on the other hand, does not have to be daily news. Which is the distinction I wish more newspaper companies would understand. You'll never get people to pay for box scores or reprints from the AP/Reuters. You will get people to pay for investigative journalism, quality insight, in depth reporting, etc.
The Times would have a better chance at monetizing if they stuck to such a 'members' section concept. Another under-appreciated fact overlooked in most monetization schemes: people will pay for the ability to comment and be given preferential comment placement. And when only subscribers can comment, it's far easier to police for spam and moderate for civility.
Probably there's not much point reading that rather than this, but I thought I'd make the connection since I noticed it.
Also reported here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060009
A connection is suggestion with the release of the Apple tablet.
Given the widely accepted disaster that was TimesSelect, this doesn't seem to be off to a promising start. How do you make such a monumental decision about your business, announce it publically, and say, yeah, we'll figure out how this will work soon, get back to us in a few months.
And it's not just business strategy. As pierrefar notes in another thread, they haven't figured out how they're going to achieve this anyway...
Will they deindex from Google? Wi
Well, maybe only slightly sarcastic.
This is the death-knell of the traditional news media. When they start actively driving consumers away by charging for services once rendered free, there is no way they will be able to recover. The Internet has enabled citizen journalists to get inside the established media's OODA loop and take them out. Established media is too slow and too antiquated to ever be able to catch up, let alone get ahead and stay ahead.
But I'm in the same boat. I already shell out ~$100 a year for the Economist, and various other subscriptions. If I have to start paying for all the news SOURCES I read I'm going to be out a great deal more. Note I said SOURCES. I'm willing to pay for news, but not a monthly subscription to a news site I only read occasionally.
Don't think about it in terms of news. News is everywhere. In-depths reports, amazing visualizations, and insightful editorials are not everywhere, and NYTimes does these better than anyone else I know. I think they have earned the right to charge.
To be sure, outfits like the NYT that bring the public high quality news need to make enough money to pay the bills and their staff. I just don't know if this is the plan that will work.
Most people under 35 scoff at paying a newspaper because they news they print is not targeted at us.
"My opinion, the NYT will never implement the paywall they talked about today. If they were going to do it, they'd just do it."
Only channels I know that do not have any ads are the movie channels (HBO etc).
So I doubt NYTimes will pass up potential revenue from displaying ads to subscribers. Just that these ads will be more targeted and focused depending on the audience.
No mention of what will happen to the currently free (and super) iPhone/iTouch app.
I assume it will sadly turn into the WSJ app (few free articles, majority subscriber-only).
Of course, I can see Steve Jobs and Apple working a deal with the NYTimes to bundle a free 1-yr subscription for their iSlate owners.
I wonder if they'd be net better off adopting a pay-what-you-want model.
A democracy cannot function without an informed public. The press has traditionally been seen as the main guarantor of keeping people informed. Creating a paywall is exclusiory to the less well off. This therefore makes the United States less democratic.
Can I please be argued with rather than downvoted or is there no such thing as netiquette these days ?
