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New York Times to Stop Charging Web Fees
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| josh4 |
| quote: | New York Times to Stop Charging Web Fees
By SETH SUTEL, AP Business Writer
Monday, September 17, 2007
(09-17) 18:29 PDT New York (AP) --
The New York Times said Monday it is scrapping a two-year-old program to charge fees for access to parts of its Web site, including op-ed columnists and archives dating back to 1987.
As of midnight Tuesday, the Times will discontinue its TimesSelect feature, which cost $49.95 per year or $7.95 by the month. Home delivery subscribers were able to sign up for free.
The move reflects a growing shift in thinking in the media industry, where it had once been thought that charging for access to some or all of a Web site was the best strategy for making money.
But in recent years, the amount of money being spent on online advertising has been surging, offering other alternatives for making profits online.
Two years after its September 2005 launch, TimesSelect had 227,000 online-only paying customers, while another 471,200 received it for free as a benefit of their home delivery subscriptions. Another 89,200 received it for free on college campuses, for a total base of 787,400.
"A lot has changed since the time we launched TimesSelect," Vivian Schiller, the manager of NYTimes.com, said in an interview Monday.
Among other things, the Times found ways to fine-tune the way search engines combed articles at the site, offering new opportunities to build online traffic, Schiller said. She also said many more users were coming to the site after being directed there by search engines such as Google Inc.'s.
Among other newspapers, Pearson PLC's Financial Times charges for access to some of its Web site, and The Wall Street Journal has the largest paid online base with about 1 million users, but that strategy is also being reconsidered and could be one of several changes under the Journal's new owner, Rupert Murdoch, whose media conglomerate News Corp. has agreed to buy Dow Jones & Co. for $5 billion.
While it was running, using TimesSelect was the only way to get online access to several news and opinion columnists at the Times, including all of its op-ed columnists.
As of midnight Tuesday, access to nearly all of the material that had been limited to TimesSelect users will be free. Article archives going back the last 20 years will be free, and so will older archives from 1851 and 1923, which are in the public domain. The Times will still charge a fee for access to archived stories published between 1923 and 1986.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...&sn=001&sc=1000 |
The times, they are a-changing. Do any of you even read the news hard-copy anymore? Maybe Opus, hes the old guy. |
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| Omega_M |
| nice. :cool: I read a hard copy sometimes, if I am in the library and have nothing else to do. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| Finally. This makes me very happy. I read the local paper, so it was hard to justify paying for the Times as well, since I don't read it every single day. Really all I've wanted access to is the op-Eds, which of course they charge for. So finally, I will once again be able to get my dose of Kristof and Friedman on a regular basis. |
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| Omega_M |
Here's a nice article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on a related topic.
| quote: | Red All Over
By STEVEN RATTNER
February 15, 2007
The news about newspapers could hardly be more dismal: falling circulation, repeated rounds of layoffs, disappearing ads and a chain of bad earning reports. It's an unsavory stew of ills, one that shows little prospect of becoming more appetizing. Many journalists -- and having spent the first slice of my career reporting for the New York Times, I still regard myself as one -- would prefer to blame the nasty folks in their corporate offices. By this reckoning, it was the layoffs that degraded the quality that cost the readers that led the advertisers to flee that caused more layoffs and so forth. That smacks of a vicious circle, or perhaps more of a perfect storm that began with the loss of readership. The Washington Post, a model of journalistic excellence, has lost 14% of its circulation since 2000. Across the industry, circulation has been dropping for 20 years, and worse, the pace of decline seems to be accelerating. In the 12 months ending in September of last year, the 50 largest papers lost 3.2% of their daily circulation. Only two newspapers in the top 25 -- the two New York tabloids -- grew circulation during this period, a statement in itself.
Perhaps most worrisome is the loss of young readers, who have drifted away steadily since the early 1970s, long before there was an Internet, when more than 70% of 18- to 34-year-old Americans read a daily newspaper. Last year that figure stood at 35%. No doubt, the Internet has tempted some, particularly the young, with a free and timelier product. In September, a record 58 million Americans visited a newspaper Web site, and many newspapers are fighting hard for more with interesting new products, such as by emphasizing local news and providing easier ways for readers to share stories and ideas, a version of viral marketing. Even though most news sites are free, if all that was happening was a shift from print to online, newspapers could imagine a successful transition since nearly all the marketing, production and distribution costs associated with print would vanish with the presses and trucks.
But regrettably, newspapers face more complex, deeper and considerably more intractable challenges than these theories suggest. The time that Americans spend reading newspapers has been dropping steadily (now down to 15 hours a month), with scant evidence that quality Internet time is taking its place. In September, the average visitor to newspaper Web sites spent only 41.5 minutes per month on those sites, up 10% from the previous year but not nearly enough to make up the loss. And while the use of newspaper Web sites is growing, the vast preponderance of Americans get their online news through the big portals (AOL, Yahoo, etc.), which means that they are mostly consuming a bland porridge of wire service stories. Most fundamental is whether the public is still interested in news (as opposed to entertainment, gossip or lifestyle info). More than fearing the death of newspapers -- they will struggle on -- we ought to fear what changing reading and viewing habits are forcing newspapers to think of as news. We shouldn't fault the papers for this, however, any more than we should fault the evening news for going soft or the newsweeklies for their endless lifestyle covers or CNN for its hyperventilating over every weather blip. They're merely providing what their customers are demanding. We should also bear in mind that for that sliver of America that seeks quality news, it is arguably more available today than ever before: There is this newspaper, now published six days a week; the national edition of the New York Times home-delivered across the country; the Economist (with its U.S. circulation of 600,000); the NewsHour, the BBC and Charlie Rose on public television; and for the true junkies, C-Span. Not to mention the more rarefied Internet precincts.
But for newspapers, the challenges are mounting, including advertisers fleeing not only to follow lost readers but also because they believe that newer forms of media can be both more cost-effective and just plain more effective. For example, classified ads, which can represent a third of a typical newspaper's revenue, can be delivered online faster (instantaneous), more conveniently (searchable) and cheaper (sometimes free via Craigslist). Not much imagination or boldness is required to predict that classifieds could completely disappear from newspapers. Display advertising presents another worry. For years, newspaper advertisers soldiered on without any clear metric for value received because they had no viable alternative. Now, thanks to Google, we have "pay per click" ads lined up alongside our search results, allowing an advertiser to know exactly what he is paying each time a surfer lands on his ad. Pay per click has evolved into "pay per lead," in which an advertiser pays based on a viewer filling out a form or making a similar affirmative response, and now even "pay per transaction," in which an advertiser only pays if a sale is made. In short, it's not the need for profits that's changed -- that's older than Adam Smith -- it's the ability of newspapers to generate those profits. If public ownership for newspapers is problematic, then, why not withdraw from the harsh glare of Wall Street altogether? Some trumpet "going private" -- replacing pesky public shareholders with private equity. However inviting that may seem to beleaguered managers, this option merely substitutes one rapacious posse of shareholders for another equally fierce brigade of capitalists. The fundamental problem -- a declining business -- would remain.
Others yearn for the good old days of munificent family ownership. Billionaires are popping up across the country, from Boston to Los Angeles, eager -- depending on which story to believe -- either to add a trophy property to their mantel or to save an institution important to a free society. Mogul-in-chief ownership brings its own complications. A new gaggle of Sulzbergers and Grahams could certainly reinject an emphasis on quality journalism. But for every Adolph Ochs, the great patriarch of the Times, there was a William Randolph Hearst. In more recent times, Wendy McCaw bought the Santa Barbara News-Press in 2000 and after six havoc-filled years, the editor and six top colleagues stomped out. Meanwhile, the local group that purchased the Philadelphia Inquirer and its companion Daily News has announced a round of layoffs. The omnipresent stresses suggest that we can't expect the objectives of enterprises that were organized around a for-profit interest to necessarily intersect with the societal value of quality journalism. So perhaps it's time to think about new models for the news business.
Not-for-profit status might be one possibility. Instead of having billionaire moguls as proprietors, we could try to turn them into philanthropists who found nonprofit organizations to buy and operate their local papers. At least one such example exists: the St. Petersburg Times, owned by the Poynter Foundation as a result of a bequest by Nelson Poynter. Purchasing major newspapers would be costly and perhaps impractical, so a hybrid model may make more sense. We could create a pool of money (possibly from a license fee similar to how the BBC is funded). News organizations with an expensive but important project in mind could apply for funding, much the way producers in the public television world have for the last 40 years. Philanthropy could also play a role here, as Joan Kroc did when she left NPR a $200 million kitty. We've had experience in the past -- the New York City subways come to mind -- with businesses that began as conventional, for-profit corporations, and, for one reason or another, were later rendered unprofitable while still being viewed as essential services. It's time to apply some creative thinking to newspapers and, for that matter, to serious journalism in other media. Then we need to convince Americans that they should pay attention to it -- and pay for it. |
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| Fir3start3r |
Interesting stat there Omega_M.
Myself, just being outside the range of that stat, can honestly say I've never subscribed to a newspaper or even bought one.
And when they ask, I always tell them I guess all my news online. :D |
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| Jake Benson |
| I've been reading the NYTimes for a year online free...what part was charging? :conf: |
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| josh4 |
| quote: | Gems from the archive of the New York Times
Now that the NY Times has discontinued their Times Select subscription program and made much more of their 150+ years of content available for anyone to read and link to, let's take a look at some of the more notable items that the non-subscriber has been missing.
- Access to the last two years-worth of columns from the NY Times' noted Op-Ed columnists, including Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, and Paul Krugman.
- The first mention of the World Wide Web in the Times in February 1993. According to the article, the purpose of the web is "[to make] available physicists' research from many locations". Also notable are this John Markoff article on the internet being overwhelmed by heavy traffic and growth...in 1993, and a piece, also by Markoff, on the Mosaic web browser.
- Early report of Lincoln's assassination..."The President Still Alive at Last Accounts".
- A report on Custer's Last Stand a couple of weeks after the occurance (I couldn't find anything sooner). The coverage of Native Americans is notable for the racism, both thinly veiled and overt, displayed in the writing, e.g. a story from September 1872 titled The Hostile Savages.
- From the first year of publication, a listing of the principle events of 1851.
- An article about the confirmation of Einstein's theory of gravity by a 1919 expedition led by Arthur Eddington to measure the bending of starlight by the sun during an eclipse.
- A front page report on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, including a seismograph of the quake which the Times labeled "EARTHQUAKE'S AUTOGRAPH AS IT WROTE IT 3,000 MILES AWAY".
- The first mention of television (as a concept) in the Times, from February 1907. "The new 'telephotograph' invention of Dr. Arthur Korn, Professor of Physics in Munich University, is a distinct step nearer the realization of all this, and he assures us that 'television,' or seeing by telegraph, is merely a question of a year or two with certain improvements in apparatus."
- First mention of Harry Potter. Before it became a phenomenon, it was just another children's book on the fiction best-seller list.
- Some of the output by prolific Times reporter R.W. Apple is available (after 1981, pre-1981).
- A report during the First World War of the Germans using mustard gas. Lots more reporting about WWI is available in the Times archive.
- Not a lot is available from the WWII era, which is a shame. For instance, I wish this article about the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima was available in the Times archive. Nothing about the moon landing, Kennedy's assassination, Watergate, etc. etc. either. :(
- On The Table, Michael Pollan's blog from last summer about food soon after the publication of The Omnivore's Dilemma.
- Urban Planet, a blog about cities from Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map.
- Oddly, The Principles of Uncertainty, an illustrated blog by Maira Kalman isn't available anymore. Update: Kalman's blog is probably unavailable because it's due to be published in book form in October. (thx, rafia) Further update: Kalman's blog is back online and wonderful. The culprit was a misconfiguration at the Times' end. (thx, rich)
- Several other previously unavailable blogs are listed here and here.
- It looks like most of the links to old NY Times articles I (and countless other early bloggers) posted in the late 90s and early 00s now work. Tens of thousands of broken links fixed in one pass. Huzzah!
I'll also note that this move by the Times puts them in a much better position to win the Long Bet between Dave Winer and the Times' Martin Nisenholtz at the end of this year.
In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.
As of the end of 2005, the Times was not faring very well against blogs.
Update: One more: a report on the sinking of the Titanic. A small mention of the sinking was published in the paper the previous day.
http://www.kottke.org/07/09/gems-fr...-new-york-times
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| George Smiley |
| Fair play to NYT this is great (I just wish they'd thought about that while I was at Uni!!!) |
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