$5 a month for on-line content?
Michael Crowley in TNR:
Given that some people spend $5 per day on coffee, paying that much per month for online access the best newspaper in the world strikes me as an absolute no-brainer. I myself would pay twice as much. I hope the idea catches on, and I hope this marks a shift from the days of newspapers panicking to the start of successful new business models.
One way the NYT can make online subscriptions far more appealing is by doing a better job of promoting the terrific new TimesReader 2.0, a simple but slick Adobe-based application that you install onto your computer in like two minutes. I’ve been meaning to plug this for a while, because it was only after I tried the incredibly user-friendly and print-like TimesReader that I could imagine surviving without the Times on paper. Among other things, it’s most excellent for traveling, because it downloads the day’s entire print paper (with regular auto-updates from the web during the day) and saves it offline on your hard drive, which lets you read it anywhere, regardless of whether you have an Internet connection. And!–yes, this is becoming a Ginsu knife commercial–TR saves the past seven days’ papers in your computer, also offline, and all of it easily searchable. (It’s also free to home delivery subscribers.) Congrats to the NYT for showing some real savviness here.
I’m a little torn here. I don’t have any problem with paying for the Times. I already pay for the Wall Street Journal online, for example, and I figure that’s just part of the job. But if the Times does go this route, I hope they provide some mechanism for providing short-term public links to individual articles. I generally try not to link to pieces that readers can’t click through to read themselves, partly as bloggy courtesy and partly because it’s one of the things that keeps bloggers honest. If the Times blocked off online access completely to nonsubscribers, I’d link to them way less and would therefore find them way less useful.
As for the broader question of whether this will work, it’s hard to say. On the one thand, we’re rapidly entering an era in which the Times is almost literally the only top notch general purpose newspaper in the country, now that the LA Times and Washington Post seem to be in death spirals. That means less competition, which in turn means that if you really care about serious news, you don’t have much choice except to pony up.
The other is simply that among the New York Times’ fans, a group in which I would include myself, I think there’s a tendency to overstate the extent to which the NYT is indispensable. Crowley says that it’s only thanks to the deployment of the new NYT reader software that he can begin to imagine life without a print Times. In the real world, though, the overwhelming majority of people are living life without a print Times and have been for years: “The New York Times had an average of 647,695 weekday home delivery subscribers as of the 26 weeks ended March 29, according to Audit Bureau of Circulations data.” Now I definitely would pay $5 a month to read the NYT online. And I’m the kind of person who, did the internet not exist, would subscribe to the print NYT. But how many Yglesias’ and Crowleys are there in the world? The NYT’s online audience is now vastly larger than its print audience. How much of that is because the online version is free?
I’d gladly pay $5a month to have the NYT delivered to me via the magic of the Internet. If this were 1995. Back then, the prospect of getting “the best newspaper in the world” delivered to my house and office in electronic format that I could easily save and share would have been exciting. Fast forward a few years, though, and there’s an amazing array of great content available for free on the Web. The only limitation is my ability to find and read it all.
In early 2003, when I started this blog, I used to read the NYT, WaPo, Slate, RealClearPolitics, and several other sites every day. Soon, I was also checking out 40 or more blogs a day via my blogroll. Somewhere along the way, however, I quit doing that. Because of various aggregation techniques that I employ, virtually everything I read online is at the individual page level and it’s generally irrelevant to me which organization produced the news. That is to say, I read content, not newspapers.
Contrary to the views of many of my brethren on the right, I continue to think NYT is a superb paper that produces an extraordinary amount of outstanding content on a daily basis along with the occasional dreck. But it’s not indispensable. There’s just too much great content out there, even if others produce it in smaller amounts and ratios. Indeed, I wouldn’t much notice if it were gone.
Didn’t they already do that in 2007? Newspapers like to gripe about giving away their product for free on the Internet, but that’s not really accurate. They may not get the same kind of ad rates as they do for their print editions, but advertisers do buy space on newspaper websites. They also don’t mention the readers they get from bloggers linking and discussing their articles, which drive up page views and ad dollars.
One could understand a newspaper trying this, though, in a desperate attempt to find a successful formula … if the theory hadn’t already flopped, and flopped famously, in the recent past.
