A sea change in the making: as promised some time ago, as of March 28, the New York Times will no longer make all of its content free on the internet. Here’s a summary of the changes, as set forth in a letter from the publisher:
If you are a home delivery subscriber of The New York Times, you will continue to have full and free access to our news, information, opinion and the rest of our rich offerings on your computer, smartphone and tablet. International Herald Tribune subscribers will also receive free access to NYTimes.com.
If you are not a home delivery subscriber, you will have free access up to a defined reading limit. If you exceed that limit, you will be asked to become a digital subscriber.
This is how it will work, and what it means for you:
On NYTimes.com, you can view 20 articles each month at no charge (including slide shows, videos and other features). After 20 articles, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber, with full access to our site.
On our smartphone and tablet apps, the Top News section will remain free of charge. For access to all other sections within the apps, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber.
The Times is offering three digital subscription packages that allow you to choose from a variety of devices (computer, smartphone, tablet). More information about these plans is available at www.nytimes.com/access.
Again, all New York Times home delivery subscribers will receive free access to NYTimes.com and to all content on our apps. If you are a home delivery subscriber, go to http://homedelivery.nytimes.com to sign up for free access.
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.
The home page at NYTimes.com and all section fronts will remain free to browse for all users at all times.
As of March 28, pricing will be as follows:
An NYTimes digital subscription provides ongoing access to our digital content. We offer three options, each of which provides unlimited access to the Web site. The differences between the options are based on which smartphone and/or tablet apps are included. The options and pricing are as follows:
NYTimes.com Plus Smartphone App:* $3.75 per week (billed every 4 weeks at $15.00)Unlimited access to NYTimes.com from any device
NYTimes.com Plus Tablet App:* $5.00 per week (billed every 4 weeks at $20.00)
Unlimited access to the NYTimes app for BlackBerry, iPhone and Android-powered phonesUnlimited access to NYTimes.com from any device
All Digital Access:* $8.75 per week (billed every 4 weeks at $35.00)
Unlimited access to the NYTimes app for iPad, plus Times Reader 2.0 and the NYTimes App for the Chrome Web StoreUnlimited access to NYTimes.com, plus smartphone apps and tablet apps
Unlimited access to NYTimes.com from any device
Unlimited access to the NYTimes app for BlackBerry, iPhone and Android-powered phones
Unlimited access to the NYTimes app for iPad, plus Times Reader 2.0 and the NYTimes app for the Chrome Web Store
This seems to me like a step in the right direction, since putting all content on the internet for free is not a sustainable business model. Dead-tree media are not long for this world, IMHO, after which point the electronic version is all we’ll have.
It will be fascinating to see the extent to which other major media outlets follow the NYT’s lead.
Though I’ll be disappointed not to get the free content anymore.
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p>Also, this seems like a reasonable way to deal with the issue about how blogs can link to Times stories:
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p>One question, though: what’s to stop some sort of aggregator from simply compiling links to Times articles and making the links available as part of a blog? I suppose this would be a way to circumvent the limits on free article access.
News is an inherently difficult industry to monetize. You can’t copyright facts. If you report some news story, someone else can go around and re-report the same thing. They can’t just copy your article, but the facts themselves are in the public domain. The existing news industry has largely made its money off things other than the news itself. When communications technology were more primitive, newspapers had an advantage. You could still re-report news then, but since they were able to get from telegraph to printer as fast as possible, they were hard to beat if you wanted news when it was new. And even then, advertising was a major major part of the revenue, so selling newspapers wasn’t really enough.
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p>As far as I’m concerned, the future of news is in public/quasi-public entities, which get money from donations, federal grants, and such. Some very high quality journalism comes out of public media. Which is why it’s a real fucking shame that the Republican Party is trying to neuter the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
What some call “dead tree media” and I call print media is inherently egalitarian and enduring.
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p>As programs, equipment, and peripherals change (and they do – who reads 5 1/4 floppies any more) information will be lost.
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p>The audience for electronic information while large, is not as large as circulating broadsides once had – I am told 12,000,000 Americans read some of Abraham Lincolns letters in ‘broadside’ – and many newspapers had four editions a day.
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p>As a teenager, all it took was a Gestettner, hand cranked newspapers and shoe leather to win an upset election, back in the day in Detroit.
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p>Hard to imagine, isn’t it?
Of course, African Americans and women, among others, might have largely been wasting their time, had they been among those hypothetical 12 million, considering that they couldn’t vote in the 1860s.
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p>The Internet, for all its faults, is by far the most democratic form of communication yet devised.
How about for the 40% of people without access to the internet? Most of whom are disproportionately poor and non-white. By definition something that costs money to participate in is not truly egalitarian since it will automatically make class distinctions. Civic participation and access to information should be available to all, regardless of means.
The Pew Internet and American Life projects estimates that 79% of Americans USE the internet, 71% of Black, non-Hispanics, 95% of those aged 18-29, and 63% of those with household income less than $30K.
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p>As to means, I spend less per month on my internet connection than I do for my weekend newspaper habit…
…still LIKE dead tree media. I catch things in print that I don’t on an internet site. An article might catch my attention as I’m skimming a paper that I wouldn’t bother clicking on from the web. I’d scan the obituaries as I’m flipping through a paper, but wouldn’t click on that section online.
the Governor’s Council also likes the dead-tree version. 😉
…but I supported Jason Panos in the last election in part because I liked his ideas to bring the GC into the 21st century, starting with actually getting them a website.
I’m with you, UserGoogol. I whole-heartedly agree that it’s a shame about the Republicans and the CPB, but NPR is thriving for reasons other than the government’s support (which as the recent flap confirmed may not be essential to its existence). The NYT would get smaller but it might also get better. Print copies will probably be available forever, but at increasing prices and for a dwindling pool of subscribers. The delivery vehicle and corporate structure may change, but I believe the substance will live on. Let’s make the NYT ours!
First, the Times adds that access to a news story will be free if you click to it from a link on a blog.
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p>Second, I think it is a little weird that there is no unbundled web-access option. The cheapest option includes a smartphone app thing, do not need.
In the early days of the media trying to get online, they put everything up for free with the idea of getting it up there the fastest and grabbing eyes. Those days, their sites were little more than a simple online posting of articles written for the print editions, no more, no less. Today, there’s online unique material, multimedia, and rapid updates to seriously breaking stories. Unfortunately for them, the horse is already out of the barn as far as giving their product away at no charge, and most people have so many sources available to them for their news that there is no reason to pay anyone for it. They can try to charge, and might even be marginally successful at it, but for most of us, we have no intention of paying for it via subscription, microfees, or any other scheme. Their influence is based on the number of people who read their opinions and reporting. Absent those readers, their influence diminishes, and any reason to read them goes down as well, in an ever swirling circle down the drain.
but not at their prices. They could have taken a lesson from Netflix: always think ahead, think big, and do things that get as many people on your service as possible — which includes dirt cheap prices and the best content available. Netflix is even about to get in the content generation camp and try to compete with the likes of Showtime and HBO. Newspapers like the NYT, on the other hand, haven’t been willing to change or adapt their business models in about a century — despite having significant advantages of a huge costumer base and often times brand name trust.
Anything with hits can find a business model to succeed. Anything without them? Not so much.
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p>To me, this is backward thinking that’s very much in line with this dinosaur industry that failed to think up the concepts of sites like Craigslist and social networking, when they could have been leaders in them and made gazillions.
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p>Will this keep them in business? I suppose. But the majority of a newspaper’s resources are spent on the dead print side of the business, not on actual production of news. Ads + forward thinking can turn the web traffic of a NYT into a bankable asset, but only if they realize dead trees are an albatross. They need to stop thinking like a 20th century newspaper and start thinking like a Google — or given the NYT’s level of Fail, even an AOL.
The price is right for me
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p>And I like the blog font as it appears on my screen. I assume I will be as happy as I already am –mostly– with Globe Reader.
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p>BTW — I still buy the NYT at a news stand almost every day. to re read in the evening. They don’t home deliver in my Dorchester neighborhood, and I do like getting that ink all over my clothes.
You’re already paying for the paper version anyway, may as well subscribe and get access to all the others for the same price as buying it in print.
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p>There are plenty of free dailies and weeklies. I’m not arguing that they’re of the quality of the NYTimes, but then again their viewership isn’t as broad nor as wealthy. It’s not obvious to me that advertising revenue can’t pay for the cost of online distribution and reporting.
if advertising could cover the the cost of the news operation, don’t you think they’d prefer to go that route? They are obviously well aware that putting up a pay wall will substantially reduce readership.
I think they’d go the route of making the most money, not choosing any ol’ strategy which makes sure that they stay afloat. I don’t fault them for that.
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p>You claim without any evidence that putting all content on the Internet for free is not sustainable. I’m not so sure that your claim is true, as it pertains to breaking even, not optimizing profits which is what the NYTimes is (rightfully) doing.
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p>Uh huh. And you claim without any evidence that my claim is false. Well, in the history of the world, giving expensive stuff away for free has not often proven to be a successful business model, so I’d say that history is on my side. But I’d be delighted to be proven wrong, as I dig free stuff. 😀
I already mentioned the example of the LA Times below, but there’s also HuffPost and probably at least another dozen or more major online news organizations that pay for a new staff and make profits. And of course, there’s other models that work, too (non-profits; privately owned, smaller operations that didn’t go on binge-buying sprees in the ’90s & early 2000s, etc.).
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p>AOL is so confident online news can work that they created Patch.com, which is hundreds and hundreds of new online local papers around the country. The craziest thing about it is I think it’s actually going to work, with the kind of synergy they’re creating in that company with their wide array of online content.
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p>So, it’s pretty conclusive to me that news organizations can make profits with legit news staffs as online entities. What is less clear is if a publicly-traded company can make big enough profits with something that’s both online and in major off-line distribution. The off-line paper and distribution business is incredibly expensive — by far the biggest expense of most news organizations that run print. It may very well be that the cannibalization that takes place on the dead-tree side of the biz by putting content online for free may be too much for papers without being forward thinking enough to create new and exciting ways to make profits off the wider readership.
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p>If newspapers are seeking the same kind of growth and profits they had in decades past (and don’t let anyone kid themselves, papers used to make huge $$$), they need to reinvent themselves and be truly forward thinking. There’s no reason why the NYT couldn’t have been CNET, or why the Tribune company couldn’t have been Craigslist, or why some of the big chains out there couldn’t have created a Facebook — other than the fact that their leadership lacks the vision to have come up with these things. Yet, new and exciting things are emerging even in this day — and the big papers out there are making many of the same mistakes again, and the mistakes they aren’t making is only because of the fact that they don’t have the $$ to make them anymore.
it’s debt, dead trees and distribution of those dead trees. Other big national papers have admitted they get enough from online ads to actually pay for the news staff (at the very least, the LA Times has done this). Could they pay for the newspaper? No, too much (literal) dead weight.
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p>If the NYT didn’t spend a billion dollars on the Globe, etc., it wouldn’t be in such a huge debt problem today and I doubt they’d be forced into this sort of a route. As it is, I still think if they were a forward thinking organization they could come up with new features and tools that would be big revenue generators — but while I think they have some really talented people at that paper (including on the electronic end — their apps, for example, are fantastic from what I’ve seen), it’s a paper run by arrogant dinosaurs.
If “dead tree media” are to go extinct, then there must be a form of access available for all.
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p>Given the defunding of NPR, the willingness of the Radical Right to let roads, bridges, and dams rot rather than funding government, can you truly believe that access to the internet, and electronic media will be available or paid for so all can have access, whether or not they are homeless, whether or not they have computers?
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p>It is libraries that are the most egalitarian form of information dispersal, not the internet.
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p>Paper media may get slimmer, ownership may well unfortunately consolidate, but I do not view this as an improvement; I view this as a loss.
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p>I also don’t see the print media and internet media as competitors in the best of all imaginable worlds. Each has strengths and weaknesses.
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p>Strong print media and strong internet media, independent of control by oligarchs would be best.
For the record, I say this out of deep love for newspapers, and bewilderment at their swiftly approaching fate.
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p>But they are doomed.
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p>Yesterday I went by a Blockbuster Video — except it wasn’t. It was an empty building that said Blockbuster Video. Great location though.
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p>Imagine being the man/woman who owned that business. You probably love movies, you’re set. People will never stop watching movies. Then along comes Netflix. Poof.
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p>Eat healthy, drink in moderation, and be merry, for tomorrow …
it was Netflix, cable television, pay per view broadening their market dramatically, Best Buy and Wal*Mart selling movies for $8, those DVD vending machines at the grocery stores, the rise of video gaming amongst adults competing for entertainment time, and so forth.
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p>Netflix certainly had a big role, but it didn’t act alone in the killing of Blockbuster.
Never just one thing.
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p>And Blockbuster drove a lot of little stores out of business.
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p>I’m so old I can remember when the Gap was a retail powerhouse.
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