NY Times to Charge for Online Viewing?

Reuters: New York Times Mulls Charging Web Readers. 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.

I'd probably pay. Then again, I've been paying for Web journalism for years, for such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Salon and Consumer Reports (I even paid for Slate when it was charging). Part of my motivation has been to support online journalism. But part has been the value I received.

Would you pay for the Times online?

Comments

[craig]

I don't visit newspaper sites if I can't get around their registration because of privacy concerns. For the Mercury, I use an address I found at Bugmenot.com.
My reading habits on the web involve a lot of skimming to catch the odd article here or there, instead of sticking with one publication and reading it through. This greatly diminishes the value I perceive I'd be getting from a subscription.

[Joe I.]

Yes I would absolutly pay for the NYTimes. I like you Dan value GOOD journalism whether it is a professional established entity or a new medium that is credible and accurate. So much of the politics, law, business of the day is reported by the Times. If we want a good paper we must pay for one. I am all for the fee because as craigslist, eBay, and web ads cut into revenue they have to pay the bills some how. It is the wave of the future.

[Hyphenman]

Would I pay for the Times online? No. I do pay for Salon, but that's because I believe in what it's doing and it doesn't have another source of income.

I figure that I'll be able to find the important information elsewhere on the web if the Times goes subscription. The Times is not ready to fold for lack of funds.

[Ron]

I filled out the free registration for NYT to read it. But I have never filled out once since for any paper and I certainly won't subscribe to NYT or any other. We pay through the nose as it is just to be able to access the internet. I won't pay more.

Demand of the next revolution. On birth every child is given free unlimited telecommunications access, irrevocable. Free communicatiton is a public good and a human right. Period.

[Will Fitzgerald]

It all depends on the price, and what you get for it--access to the NYT archives? To the crossword puzzle? Also, I currently feel like I'm at the mercy of the NYT's beneficence, as when they cut off access to the archives. If I'm directly paying for the content, in some way I have more control over what I can get to. I don't think I'd pay that much, though--our local paper already carries a lot of NYT content (including the crossword puzzle!) and I wouldn't want to pay twice.

[Jim Horning]

Yes, I would probably pay, under one condition. I pay for the Wall Street Journal, and rely on it less. (I also have paper subscriptions to both papers.)

The condition would be that they agree to stop putting those damn flashing ads on my screen. (Something the hardcopy version never does.) It's not just that they distract from what I'm trying to read. If I don't get them off the screen quickly, they can trigger a migraine headache.

Actually, I would probably boycott the advertisers who use flashing ads, if I looked at the ads long enough to know who was advertising.

Jim H.

[Håkon Styri]

Pay for the NYT, or any other foreign newspaper? Well, I'd probaly pay for a very select few. I don't know is any of them would be US papers.

One of the things I really enjoy about news on the net is that it's fast and easy to look up the original story rather than reading something translated (if needed) and retold by some local news organization that usually miss out lots of details. However, I usually read only a tiny fraction of what's in the average US newspaper. The price per story would be rather high if I had to subscribe.

I guess I would give the bloggers a try first. They may be better at filtering the news than the local media. In addition they sometimes add useful informastion rather than just filtering.

[Deans]

I'd definitely pay for the NY Times. I get most of my news from that site & the WSJ Online which I already pay for. I'd even be happy to pay if they would get rid of the fly-over ads.

[Tom Guarriello]

Short answer: yes. I pay for the paper version, as I pay for the paper WSJ, so I'd pay for the e-version, a la, Journal. Question is: does the Times lose "reach" by charging? Is that loss of reach outweighed by the revenue gains? Net/Net: my guess is: no. Over time, this decision will prove more costly than beneficial to the Times. While the Journal is a specialized publication, the Times claims to be "the paper of record." I think this decision would ultimately hurt them.

[Kevin Marks]

In my opinion their present business model is totally backwards - they give away the News and charge for the Olds.

If they believe they provide valuable breaking news, they should sell access to today's paper, and give away yesterdays and earlier, so they can be a paper of record.

The news junkie bloggers will pay up so they can get their commentary in early, and the non-payers can follow a day behind.

[Jeffrey A. Cross]

I'd never pay for the NY Times. After reading Bernard Goldberg's books and really paying attention to the stories in that newspaper, no thanks.

[degustibus]

I'd pay for NYTimes to get more of Judith Miller's fine reporting.

NOT!!

[Marc Orchant]

Excellent question Dan. I agree with Kevin's idea. Pay for current news and keep the archival information free. I don't particularly care if it's a day or more. Most of what I find myself reading (and getting value) from the NYT online is not that time-sensitive.

[rone]

I wouldn't be opposed to paying for the NYTimes, as long as i get no ads. If i'm already a subscriber to the print version, the online version should be available at no extra cost.

The trick will be to see if the Times has enough exclusive content to make the subscription fee worthwhile.

[Anthony Baker]

So long as they offer a discount rate for paid subscribers. And open up their archives. And, ideally, still let me get RSS feeds from them.

Would be interesting, however, to see how many people leave the paper's audience if they do become paid subscriptions.

[dennis]

absolutely not! the pravda is so braindamaged that i have stopped visiting it for anything other than krugman's opinions. if i want to read shills for the bush admin, i'll go to the whitehouse.gov site...

[Scott Whittaker]

I would absolutely pay for it provided it wasn't outlandishly priced (wouldn't pay as much for it as I would for a print subscription).

Archival access would be good, and I would love RSS access.

Scott

[David Jefferson]

Yes, I would definitely pay for the NYTimes online. In fact, for years I felt so guilty taking their product online for free that I also subscribed to the Sunday paper edition so that I could send them some revenue. Honestly! I finally gave that up because the amount of paper I was wasting really bugged me.

As an aside, I made a bet seven years ago that the NYTimes would stop publishing a regular paper edition in 15 years. I have eight years to go. I hope I win, though it does not look too promising.

I would also pay (extra) for access to the NYTimes archives, but only on a subscription basis, not on a per-article basis. I realize that this runs counter to the suggestion that access to the archives be free, but I think access to the archives has value and it is unrealistic to expect to get it for free. (I also am willing to bet that access to Google's future immense online library of all of the books in the western world will not be free either, ads not withstanding.)

Regarding obnoxious online ads in the NYTimes, the worst are the occasional ones that have sound.

[Ben Combee]

I would pay for the NYT if they would use a model like Salon -- put the start of the story in a free section, and let you only go deeper with a subscription. That would allow blogs to do permalinks to NYT articles and people tell what the link was about, but still allow them to charge for the real value they provide -- the deep articles and indepth reporting that's more than headlines. It would also let them remain "the paper of record", since linking to them to denote an event or story would still be valid and would remain valid.

[Marc g]

Maybe, depends on the price.

I have paid for Salon in the past, and may renew in the future. If the Times had a similar price point I would seriously consider it. I would not pay anything even close to the price of the print copy, especially as I refuse to believe they would remove ads for paying subscribers the way Salon does. If I'm taking on part of the overhead of their distribution costs then they can cut me a break.

I'll never pay 2.50 for an archived article. Ever. Under .50 per archived article, maybe.

[Anspar Jonte]

I will not pay for news content that is not legally shareable. Engineer the web site to work like this:

1) I read a good article.
2) I click a "forward to friend" button.
3) Friend receives e-mail containing a link to the story. Friend visits the web site and reads the story without any registration hassles.
4) The link expires after 5 days (or whatever).

[Not a Yank]

Pay for the online version of the NYTImes? Why, I can't use it for lining bird cages or house breaking puppies so the online version is valueless.

[HT]

If Google can make money without charging online users, why can't the NY Times?

If they start charging, I stop reading.

[Tim]

I'd probably pay if it was the right price point, under $50 a year, and I didn't have to see any nasty ads (not that I ever see them with Firefox + adblock), just because I have been reading the Times every day for 25 years and it is a hard habit to break.

However, there is so much good free content on the net that if the Washington Post continued to be free and keeps its archives open, I might break the 25 year reading habit and only read the WP, blogs, the alternative and tech presses and what the blogs point to.

At a time when most of us are trying to figure out how to cope with information overload, and newspaper readership is declining, especially among the young, putting a gate in front of their content doesn't seem like the smartest business idea. Maybe they should emulate Salon, with the subscribe or Free Day Pass?

[Jim Grisanzio]

Nope. If they charge, well, that's one less thing I have to read. No big deal.

[Adam Fields]

I might pay voluntarily, but I really believe that they have no way to keep their articles from being copied across the web, charging or not.

In fact, I think they should open up their archives as well.

I've started a donation campaign to convince them of this:

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2004/12/27/what-the-bagel-man-saw-and-started/

[glanz]

1) Many people around the world refuse to own credit cards for moral and political reasons... Yes Dan, many of us still believe in those old "hippified" values that failed to change the world.

2) Many people are too poor to pay and access the NYT via community access points in Libraries and community 'interner cafes'...

3) No one but an American or an Americanized Quisling would pay for American propaganda regardless of the source...

4) This is the Yppification of the net. This is a case of Corporate America in the temple...

5) Your comments make me wonder just where the "roots" of your "grass" are planted. Grassroots journalism has to do with freedom of information, not for paid freedom, nor paid information. The NYT appeals not to those who prone freedom of info, but to upper middle cl-ASS types who have sold out for the "American Way"...

6) To sum it up, I got their "subscription" hangin'....

[Stephen Downes]

Not a chance. There are many other sources of news available for free. The Times is good - but not that good.

[Steve Rhodes]

They are profitable online now. It would
be a mistake to charge a subscription. It was a mistake for the LA Times to charge for their arts coverage. Nikki Finke wrote:
when Manohla Dargis left for the NY Times:

However, the Calendar staff is known to be peeved about the “let’s-try-to-make-a-buck” decision to change online viewing of Calendar’s articles and reviews from free to subscription. LAT sources say Ouroussoff nagged bitterly and repeatedly about it. As for Dargis, in the words of one colleague, “She was very aware of being cut off from the world because Web sites that compile reviews would not have access to her work. And in the current environment out there, the Internet is where reviews are really bandied about.” That issue, though, “had nothing to do with my decision to leave,” says Dargis.

Roger Ebert and the Sun-Times were smart to put all his film writing online.

Joey Anuff of Suck was right when he spoke at a media conference
back in 98 on a panel on the future.

I have a thought on what is going on right now that's contributing to TV having the upper hand over print. This is a problem, it kills me. It kills me daily. Every time we write a column we like to weave some context with hypertext. We're on the Web. It's supposed to be about links, so we want to link to places and we want to sort of talk about what's in the current, in the news, current events.

It exists right now that all of the news sources, most of which are represented here today, exist in their own vacuum. We can't link to them. They don't have permanent URLs. If you want to go to the New York Times on the plan that they announced a few months ago, it actually would cost you more to read a review of a film that came out a year ago than to rent that film at your local video store. (Laughter) That's not going to work. That doesn't enhance the Web's value as a context building medium.

Now if the New York Times, for example, were to go ahead and open up their archives, not just three, but 10 years, 20, years, 30 years into the past, they would be as big as Yahoo. If they could put a front end that was useable there, that would be rich, unbelievable history. Nobody is even considering that. People are talking about whether they should charge 75 cents or a dollar. Nobody's saying let's go and take our archives and put them up there. If you do that, you have a resource that's pretty phenomenal.

Now TV is never... It's going to take forever for TV to be able to come up with that sort of system, to be able to match the ability to link deep into context, into footnotes. But if we don't have that in print, if print is closed off, it doesn't matter.

The New York Times will still matter, but other papers won't matter as much as they could if they
were open.
which are closed

[fluffy]

Paid subscriptions have always been more about proving the number of eyeballs newspapers deliver to advertisers rather than significant revenue. News orgs bragged to advertisers how every newspaper was read by 3.4 readers (more for those left at lunch counters and on the subway, of course).

Hit counts and unique visitors are delivered up automatically now.

If the Times is charging it's a failure to offer effective advertising.

How can offering fewer eyeballs possibly help their bottom lines?

[John Clements]

I pay for a couple of magazines, no dailies. I can't afford to pay for everything I read from commercial sources. I would just have do without some things if everything was subscription-only.

How many web publications do you pay for? How much is that all together? Likewise for paper subscriptions?

I would actually like to hear from as many people as care to respond about how much money you spend for your reading material.

I spend about US$200/year on five, nearly half of which is the one print publication.

What's important to me is that the level of informedness of our society would decline noticeably and regrettably if more publications started charging.

Obviously we all have to earn a living, but look at all the potential we are missing by not facilitating a better informed society.

[Heath@DeanTV.org]

Pay for the times? I don't think so when I can scan the headlines nearly everyday whenever I enter a store and know the pyramid structure of the content will be predictable. If the there's something particularly inviting in the editorials or columns you know it will be plastered across the blogospere. We use firestarters made of sawdust now in the fireplace so I'm not in need of the print version (though it is nice to curl up with it so my kid can pretend he's a train and run over it while I'm lying down. Translation: I never seem to get time to finish it anyhow anymore). Well, I do like the archives idea aformentioned anyhow....

[Paul Hughes]

No I would not pay for the NY times. However, I would pay for having all of my 'selected' content, like with RSS now fed to me from every paper around the world. Especially if I knew the money was going directly to the person who wrote the article. Kind of like a micro-pay/micro-content sort of scheme.

I think traditional centralized (in a building) journalism is going 'bye bye'. I thin the future of jornalism will be made up of thousands of free-lancers with a real-time web presence, all getting real-time money into their accounts as people pay to get their scoops for each story. The same as paying for each song for online tunes, instead of the whole album.

[Bob McKeand]

No!

[Karen M.]

Probably not. It would be less convenient, but if necessary, I could find Krugman and Herbert via Lexis/Nexis at work, and email them to myself to read later.

I am happy to pay for Salon Premium, but that's a different matter... plenty of access to the archives, but no flashing adds, no Judiths, no Adam etc.

[David]

I visit 4 newspaper sites daily: two local, the Times, and the Trib. Additionally, I hit 6-10 other newspaper sites or news feeds through professional and special interest sites I visit. Obviously, at present, I am taking huge advantage of 'free' news. Should all begin charging I'd probably wind up hitting many fewer sites.

At one time I subscribed to 3 daily papers, 2 weekly news magazines, and about 6 monthly magazines and journals. I'm down to 1 weekly and 2 monthly magazines. The internet is a bit part of it - why pay for something I can get free - and more timely besides. I also moved to a locale that makes recycling very inconvenient and getting rid of the old news became a bit hassle.

[fling93]

I probably won't pay unless maybe Washington Post does the same thing, in which case I'd have to think about it. In contrast, my subscriptions to The Economist and The Atlantic Monthly were no-brainers.

[Robert C Worstell]

Paid subscriptions can be circumvented through the GCache plug-in for Firefox.

I don't generally read anything nowdays except what comes up as most read in DayPop and Blogdex. So NYT comes up when someone (many someones) think(s) it useful or valuable.

Survival of the most fit data.

[Alex Burr]

If good quality journalism can't survive without subscriptions, my ideal would be a subscription version of Google News. Otherwise I'd be pretty unhappy with a subscription only world, because my current modus operandi is to read a few articles each from a large number of sites. I don't like the idea of becoming a passive consumer of news from a few sites.

I don't think I'd subcribe while there are still other good quality free sources, although it would be near the top of my list of everyone went to subscription.

[Adam Bowie]

The side effect of major news sites all moving to subscription models is that those sites that don't, become ever more powerful. Many people simply won't visit a site that charges for its news articles.

I'm not in the NY Times target market. I live in the UK and can't buy a paper copy (well I can - a day or more late and at around $10 a copy), so they're not "losing" any revenue by letting me read their web version - indeed they can make money if they wanted to serve UK/European specific ads such as many other US sites do.

But think of a world where only free agency material was available from portals such as Yahoo, while the only free commentary/editorial was from newspapers of a particularly partisan persuasion.

[Another Dan]

I suppose I'd pay, although I'd expect a discount for subscribing to the paper edition. I think paid access ultimately reduces the newspaper's influence and relevance by reducing readership.

Right now I can refer you to an important Times article via email or blog. If I can't, then the conversation we might have had, about the article and its subject, never happens. And the Times gradually becomes less important to our online journalism experience. I would think (if I could) that the ad revenue generated by free access would eventually exceed subscription income.

Look at Google. Did they charge for access?

Since this is my first comment here, Dan, congrats on your new venture, and good luck.

[Alexa Smith]

The short answer is no for the general paper. There are too many places online to get news these days for free and more targeted to my interests. The NY Times used to have a great Cybertimes Arts@large column online which they discontinued and I *would* pay for that type of service. I also tend to surf and read RSS feeds from a very large number of sites - paying for one site doesn't seem worth the $$ to me. The days of paying for general news are waning....

[Roger]

I'd pay, but not a monthly or any other kind of subscription.

Give me the option to pay .05 or .10 for each article, AFTER I've read the first two paragraphs and know I want to read the rest.

There's no way I'd subscribe to a paper where I only read 3-4 articles a month, and those only because someone links to them and they sound interesting.

[Laura]

I don't think I'd pay what they would charge (considering it's $39.95 a year for their crosswords only), but I'd definitely miss it. I use Google News Alerts to alert me to NYT content of interest (began doing that after the Times began charging for *their* news alerts) and visit the site daily. I subscribe to my local paper and get all the rest of my "print" news from the web. I don't pay for online content, not because I don't feel it's worth it, but because I can't justify the expense when there is so much that can be read for free.

[kathleen mazzocco]

I've been reading the New York Times since I was about nine years old and I'm well into middle age. It is simply the best we have. It has its flaws, and they are more apparent of late, but its principles are right and with luck they will carry the grey lady through to better days. I would gladly pay to be able to continue reading it wherever I roam.

[hkmacs]

My local paper "The South China Morning Post" here in Hong Kong has charged for their online edition ever since they started (online, that is). Not only do they plaster it with annoying ads(pop-up, blinking, GIF animations etc) but they leave out certain articles. Definitely a rip-off as they are already the most profitable newspaper in the world.

[Iolaire McFadden]

I read the NY Times online fairly regularly for national and world news. However if they changed I would not read the site.

Generally I go there and view ads because I want to see another slant on the news. I get a lot from Washington Post online (I do have the hard copy I could read), and Yahoo has a good assortment of content.

The only content I would really miss is some of those high quality 4+ screen researched news pieces. (One of the torture stories was over 8!) Unfortunately I only find my self on one of those types of stories a few times a month.

But that given, can they afford to survive on subscriptions? If so will they still have so many ads?

[J.B. Cuzz]

As someone who reads the NYTimes online every moring, I think it would depend on how much they would charge and what the exact plans for the model would be. For example, currently you have access to articles from the past 30 days and you have to pay per to access articles older than that. If they dropped it to 7 days instead of 30 and offered full access to their archives for $7-10 bucks a month, I'll pay for that.

[Richard Boone]

Who would pay for the New York Times online? The same fools that would pay for Slate online of course.

[Cynthia Typaldos]

My comments on the future of online content are here:
SubscriptionPal
http://typaldos-expertise.blogspot.com/2004/09/online-content-business-models.html

I find it amazing that the print publications aren't stepping up to the collective plate and realizing that if they don't jointly come up with a new business model, they are toast. And that would be a terrible shame because their content truly has value, and the associated costs to create.

My focus right now is DonationPal, at www.donationpal.org, which implements a subset of the proposal for SubscriptionPal.

[Neil Doherty]

Yes, I,d pay for the New York Times on line, especially if I could get it "personalized", liked the Wall St. Journal. And I don't buy the paper version often.

[mackinaw]

new york times is listed at 50 in the Alexa Web Search Top 100 sites visited in English. If they charge for content they'll drop out of that listing, I am sure. I, for one, would never pay for online content from ny times, though I occasionally buy the paper version. reading a newspaper is an experience, reading online content is info processing.

[Chris L]

I thought the NYT was very forward thinking allowing blog links free of even the registration process. I hope that wasn't simply a decision to ensnare users so they could start charging them. I'd much prefer that they figured out a better way to generate revenue with adword, RSS streams with ads, etc. than full subscription charging.

That being said, if they include archive access and they don't charge TOO much, they are one of the few online publications I would even consider paying for!

[Tom Grey - Liberty Dad]

No. I only read for free stuff right now, and there's too much good stuff to read. I block pop-ups and usually miss most ads.