New York Times Mulls Charging Web Readers

[Placebo]

The New York Times Co. is considering subscription fees to the online version of its flagship newspaper, which now is available for free, but it has no immediate plans to do so, the company said on Friday.

One of the paper's biggest rivals, Dow Jones & Co. Inc.'s Wall Street Journal, charges for its online edition. A New York Times spokeswoman said the company is reviewing whether it should make any business changes to the online version but that no shifts were imminent.

"We are reviewing the site to see whether or not there would be any areas where we should change the business model," said the spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis, adding: "This is not new. We've been discussing this for some time."

According to the upcoming issue of BusinessWeek magazine, whose cover story focuses on The New York Times Co., an internal debate has been raging at the newspaper over whether its online edition, which had about 18.5 million unique monthly visitors as of November, should adopt a subscription fee.

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[MADem]

1. The beginning of the end for the NYT

I wouldn't give them a blooming DIME to read them online. As it is, I get the print version for free from a friend, when I read it.

Talk about pricing themselves into complete irrelevancy!!!

[henslee]

12. I've downloaded the complete writers on writing series from their site.

I really like it.

[henslee]

15. Wow, just tried to read the same articles and they want 2.95 a piece for

them.

[Name removed]

18. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[NYC Liberal]

2. Is that a separate subscription for the website,

or will they let you use your current subscription info to login?

[damntexdem]

11. And what about my Sunday-only subscription?

Will that get me NYT online?

I thought that the issue with online was the ad revenue -- and that that was also the issue for print media, but subscriptions paid for delivery. Sure they're greedy, but are they being competently greedy? What if this reduces their online subscribers so loses them money? The WSJ is a different issue.

[davidinalameda]

3. guess I won't be reading them on line anymore

I can go to the library and read the paper for free if I want

[BeyondGeography]

4. Dear NYT: Count me out

I want my plagiarized stories and my trumped-up intelligence accounts for FREE, dammit.

[Anakin Skywalker]

5. Go Ahead and Charge, Greedy Bastards!

I don't read NYT anyway! Hah hah! :P

[miss_kitty]

6. heh

charge us for 'not really the news?' Bullshit from Judith Miller? I think not.

[Khephra]

7. They do have one thing worth reading

Krugman.

[HuckleB]

9. Indeed.

[miss_kitty]

10. hey! I love the crossword

but I scrounge for that. Or go to the library and photocopy the Sunday ones when I'm gonna have time on my hands.

[RPM]

8. I don't read WSJ online...

and I won't read NYT online either if they make me pay.

[Kokonoe]

13. If the times were actually the newspaper of record I would be

glad to pay. They need to do some flushing before considering it. I hope they can before it's too late.

[Downtown Hound]

14. Well, that will be the end of my relationship with the NY Times

Sorry but Bush propaganda just isn't worth my money. Hey NYT, print this thread in your next DU bashing column!

[daleo]

16. Paying for propaganda doesn't make sense

I don't see it happening, unless it is forced on consumers. For example, the internet service provider could somehow calculate the charges for each website visited and added them to the bill. If the charge were small enough per page, and there wasn't any intrusive advertising this might work. On the other hand, people wouldn't want that kind of overt logging of internet activity, so it probably wouldn't work.

I don't mind donating to DU, so people will pay if they feel that the product is valuable, and they don't want to lose it. This isn't the case with most newspaper sites, though.

[mcscajun]

17. It's inevitable....content is not free.

and never will be. Somebody, somewhere always has to pay for it.
Only question is who.

Webmasters, programmers, network servers and bandwidth all cost money. Advertisers pick up a lot of the costs for sites like the NY Times and others; we put up our pop-up blockers and we don't see their ads. If you don't click on a few of the ads that are banners or sidebars, then you're completely free-loading. This holds true for all content sites, NOT just the NY Times.

I read a bit of the NY Times every day, despite its flaws; and yes, Krugman IS one of the best things about it. :)

If the content is important enough to you, when they start charging (and so far its still just 'being considered' so it's too early to ask how much and how it will work for current free subscribers like me) you'll either pay for it, or give it up.

I've subscribed at the premium level to Salon.com for a couple of years now because I believe they provide a valuable service. I'll support DU, too.

Folks pay for DU. And if they didn't, it wouldn't be here in the robust format it is.

On edit: comment added about Salon.com

[Mr.Green93]

19. Good points.

I click ads on sites and let some Pop Ups thru. My little part to help keep the Internet free.

[leQ]

40. i agree with others when they say you make a good point

but only when there's no propaganda involved. the nytimes has very much turned into a mouthpiece for the bush administration, and like someone else mentioned, paying for propaganda is senseless.

if they start charging for the fresh news, i for one will not support the grey lady until they can demonstrate their complete independence from this administration.

[w4rma]

20. Good riddance! Now noone will read them and they won't get money from ads

either. Blasted propaganda mill.

[KamaAina]

21. Today the Times, tomorrow the whole Web

Newspaper industry consultant John Morton, who heads Morton Research Inc., said he thinks many newspapers want to wean readers off free online content and transform their Web sites into paid-only publications.

Free editions of newspapers on the Web are "quickly falling out of favor," he said. "I think you will see newspapers selling electronic subscriptions or print subscriptions, or a combination of both, which is what the Wall Street Journal does, and has been very successful at."

Carried to its logical conclusion, this trend would render the Web essentially useless as an information source. As it stands now, for instance, if there's a train wreck in South Carolina (yesterday), I can pull up the story on The State from Columbia.

But, am I subscribing to The State just for that once-a-year occurrence? And then to the (fictitious) Dodgeville, Wis. Argus for a kangaroo update? And so on every time news happens somewhere other than Honolulu (i.e. nearly all the time)? Not just no but HELL NO!

It's a mistake for Big Media, Inc. to use the WSJ as an example. Its audience is composed of (duh) Wall Street fat cats to whom fifty bucks a year or whatever is chump change. All they'll be doing here is getting us to consume less information. (Just the way Bush**co wants it :tinfoilhat: ??)

[Placebo]

22. That would be horrible.

I guess we'd still have people like Yahoo! posting their articles then and again.

[AliciaKeyedUp]

26. Since that's a copyright violation

If they do go this route, then Yahoo would be forced to abide by the same laws DU does.

[realFedUp]

23. I only read Krugman, Herbert and Dowd on occasion

I imagine they can be read on another website
in a timely fashion.

[punpirate]

24. Some large newspapers have been consistently...

... been overstating paper-media circulation (Chicago Tribune and LA Times come immediately to mind). This has affected the amount of ad revenues they receive, and that means papers like the Times might be trying to make up the shortfall by charging for the web service, since there's less money from the dailies to subsidize it.

But, one thing for certain--as soon as they do that, what news they publish drops in general circulation around the net. The Independent in the UK recently went to subscription and while it's doing okay in the UK, not much of its subscription only service gets here any longer. Many sites frequently linked to articles by Robert Fisk and a couple of other Independent writers, and now, they're infrequently found.

There's a clear problem with costs vs. the free and full dissemination of information. There are still many people in the country whose only internet access is through public facilities, such as libraries, and fee services for news and opinion articles would effectively shut them out of the loop.

My own feeling is that the larger papers certainly ought to try to subsidize web services if their principal ad revenues will pay for it. At least in the case of the Times, the web pages themselves are full of advertising, much of which doesn't show up in the form of pop-ups, but rather as embedded graphics, so the papers cannot say that the web-served pages are a complete revenue drain.

What this country really needs, though, is an independent, non-profit investigative reporting-driven news service such as the UK Guardian/Observer. That would be worth a subscription fee. The NY Times, for most of us, is just not worth the expense. It's become a mouthpiece for the administration, as have many other large papers in the country. A good example--Krugman, accepted as a nationally-recognized economist, writes steadily and articulately about the Social Security shell game the administration is trying to foist on the public while the reporters in the news section are blowing their horns for the administration's position on the issue, without even acknowledging that it's an outright lie. All they have to do is read Krugman's pieces to understand the true situation, and yet, they never seem to do so. The only wariness of the administration seems to come from the editorial pages, which are read much less frequently than the front page.

That sort of reporting doesn't seem worth a fee.

[The Judged]

25. Web advertising is a virtual reality, I guess? NOT!

[sonicx]

27. Aweful idea. If by chance NYT reports anything important...

wire services like AP will 'steal' it and convert it to their own free story. Like they did when NYT first reported the Al QaQa (heh) story.

Even if that didn't happen, i still won't pay for online news stories, especially ones from NYT.

[MADem]

28. Yep, they'll do the FAUX intro

"As reported today in the NYT..." blah blah blah....the Times reporter said (read three paragraphs verbatim, put them on the screen in snazzy graphic format)... and concluded that (paraphrase whatever they wrote). You do the reporting, we decide to rip it off!!!

One way or another, all the geniuses at NYT will do is piss people off. It's not like they don't have ads embedded in their pages, but maybe they are pissed because so many people are accessing via wireless text units, and the ads aren't showing up in that format. Maybe they should develop text ads that must be viewed before accessing the site...such a concept!!!

[bemildred]

29. Web readers mull ignoring New York Times ...

It's not like they offer anything special.

[MakeItSo]

30. No offense, but newspapers cost money to produce

It's interesting how folks think the newspaper must be generated out of thin air. Do you think that journalists, editors, Web producers and press operators and all the other support staff all work for free?

Blogs are great, but if it weren't for for-profit media they would be devoid of about 90 percent of their content. Most blogs are simply an aggregation of links to the MSM.

I think the Times dropped the ball on the election fraud story, but that's a separate issue.

Unless you have a trust fund, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You're living in a fantasy world if you think there is.

[bemildred]

31. So what? You think I owe the NYT support?

I think their content sucks. They can blow me if they don't like it.

[mcscajun]

32. Then you have no complaint when they go to fee-based subscriptions.

See my previous post (#17)

[bemildred]

33. I'm not complaining Sir, I'm saying I don't give a shit. nt

[mcscajun]

34. Sir?

No sir here...no sir :)

[bemildred]

35. OK, so next time I won't try to be polite. nt

[makhno]

38. What are you talking about

Who is talking about a free lunch? All I see is people saying the paper's shit and not worth paying for.

Go find your commie strawman elsewhere.

[bunny planet]

36. Unless they start being 'the paper of record' again I won't need to read

them at all. There coverage of what happened in Congress on the 6th was so underwhelming I almost missed it. I've already cancelled my delivered paper. If they choose to charge me online that will be unfortunate for them. I won't pay for the tepid 'journalism' they've been printing since 2000. If it was possible to just get the editorial page, I'd probably still do that, but something tells me that won't be a subscription option. They had the opportunity to make up for their unbelievable failures to inform the public accurately during the lead up to the Iraq war and they haven't. They are Republican lite these days, or afraid to be the strong liberal voice they once were.

[makhno]

37. Idiots

The fact that these fools think of comparing their shitty rag to the WSJ shows a rather tenuous grasp of reality. They might be able to scrounge a few dollars from the culture page crowd and those on the NY bourgeois circuit, but their news, economic or tech reporting just isn't worth paying for.

[goforit]

39. Well, hell!!!Why pay for it twice???....NOT

[AngryAmish]

41. I will never pay

I read the paper on-line. I love the Science coverage, baseball is ok. Will I pay for it? No way.

If the paper is not given away on-line, they will sink into irrelevancy. The demographics of the newspaper business is scary, ie young folks do not read newspapers by and large. What news they get is on-line or from John Stewart.

The future of the newspaper business is the free commuter papers. Craiglist is gutting them in urban areas.

Newspapers have ridiculous margins (25 to 33% profit). Most of the money comes from classified ads. That is why Craiglist will kill them.

[0007]

42. I don't think they're that stupid!