NYT to Contemplating $5/Month Charge
Michael Crowley gets excited:
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.
A few points. First, I’m not sure how much “catching on” this idea could possibly do. A big part of the selling point of The New York is that it’s “the best newspaper in the world.” I can see why you would pay money to read the best newspaper in the world. But why would you pay money to read the sixth-best newspaper in the world?
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?
Note that BBC News runs the world’s second-best international news website and they don’t charge anything and show no sign of ever needing to charge. That’s not the kind of firm you want to compete against.
47 Responses to “NYT to Contemplating $5/Month Charge”
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July 10th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
You really think the NYT’s news coverage is *better* than the BBC’s? I think they’d be competing against a competitor that is offering a *superior* product for free, which is the kind of firm you basically can’t possibly hope to compete against.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
I dropped my print subscription to the Times in protest to the hiring of Kristol.
They will have to fire Brooks, Dowd, Friedman, Douthat and Kristof before I even entertain the idea of subscribing.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Now that the barn door is open, it’s time that we start charging Matt $5 a typo.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
I think you answered your own question. For people who don’t have any particular habit of reading the Times there’s no reason to pay $5 a month when you can get the same information elsewhere for free. And that’s especially true when you only read the times when referred from somewhere else.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
See your point, but the BBC is funded by the state, as well as an added “license fee” when Britons buy TV sets. Not really comparable to a private entity like the Times.
I would definitely pay $5 a month for the online paper, I want it to survive. Can’t imagine NYC without it, but it’s a possibility.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
They will have to fire Brooks, Dowd, Friedman, Douthat and Kristof before I even entertain the idea of subscribing.
Huh, why group Kristof with that crowd?
And it’s not the NY Times columnists who make the paper worth saving.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Eh? What’s wrong with Kristof?
July 10th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
I’m skeptical about this. Even if a ton of news junkies/other reporters/newsbloggers sign up, I’m guessing most casual readers will just substitute to other free outlets. The LA Times, BBC, and WaPo cover probably 90% of what the NYT does, and for the remaining 10% NYT-only, well, readers can get that recap when bloggers rehash it.
This sees a lot like a rehash of Times Select a slightly lower price point, for more material. And look how well that turned out. If memory serves, that too was based on the idea that the NYT had indispensable content. Not so much.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Calling the NY Times the best international news website is sort of like calling DC United the best pro soccer team.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Honestly, I’ve been more and more discouraged by the quality of the Times. I mean, look at the headline on nytimes.com right now: “Efforts to Regulate Yoga Meet Resistance”. One thing I do find it useful for though is breaking news, but that doesn’t come up very often. And a few of the blogs, too, but there’s no way they’re going to charge for them.
Basically, if the Times cut out a bunch of the fluff and concentrated on important investigative reporting and breaking events, along with a few blog commentators and reporters, I might be willing to pay up. Otherwise, it’s Google News for me.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Didn’t they learn their lesson when they tried the firewalled editorial page?
July 10th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
And I don’t really get TimesReader. nytimes.com looks just fine in my web browser, why would I want to use a less capable reader to view the same material?
July 10th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Kristof was appalling when he wrote about Asia. He may have gotten better since then, but his Asia stuff was really horrific. As to the $5 question, why would I pay money to have Judy Miller (now gone, I know) or Elisabeth Bumiller’s crap on my computer everyday? BBC is far superior.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
epic apostrophe fail
July 10th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Eh? What’s wrong with Kristof?
So you agree with 5 out of 6?
I don’t like Kristof because I see him as well meaning but too often deficient in reasoning. I would compare him to the liberals who push for teacher-rating as if that were the answer to lack of decent jobs. Well-intentioned but not a source of accurate info.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
“Basically, if the Times cut out a bunch of the fluff and concentrated on important investigative reporting and breaking events, along with a few blog commentators and reporters, I might be willing to pay up.”
This is why I don’t get a print subscription to the LA Times, my local newspaper. It’s a shade of its former self (which is saying something).
July 10th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
I can imagine paying for the NYT on-line.
The TimesReader is a non-starter. The website already seems to work well, and doesn’t need much/any tweaking to re-enable paid access, so what’s the point? Prevent me from copying text?
July 10th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
For over 20 years, I read the NY Times daily.
I moved out of NYC and began reading it online. They were charging for the Opinion section and I found that I could do without it as there were many voices on the web that were just as good.
Their writers lost relevance as their readership dwindled.
The same will happen to the entire paper when they begin charging.
The pay model doesn’t work.
The only thing they could charge for is the crossword.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
I don’t think it’s necessarily such a bad *idea*, but it may not yet be tenable. For something like this to work, price has to be lower (like a dollar or two), and very very easy to pay.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
@grammarian Yeah, I came in here to see about that. It seemed bizarre, but would “Yglesiases” be the correct way to do a plural there?
July 10th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Um, their website sucks. It’s incredibly difficult to access more than 3 or 4 international stories, none of which are more insightful than the AP content that I’ve already read.
Why have I already read it? Because nytimes.com seems to update about 4 hours after everybody else.
This is the same as Times Select, which is the precise reason that I’ve learned to go elsewhere on the web to get my news.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
“Sweatshops are good” Kristof? “Let’s drill in ANWAR” Kristof?
July 10th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Slow-motion suicide
July 10th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Is the nytimes worth $5 a month? Almost certainly. Will I pay that? No chance.
Why? I don’t need to. As has been pointed out previously, there are plenty of good free news sources (like the bbc) online, and anything particularly interesting the times produces will get reprinted on the web somewhere.
At this price (which I think is a good deal lower than the old deal) they might be able to get enough subscribers to make the endeavor worthwhile. But it will certainly be a lower number of readers than before, since some people are going to see a subscription wall and just turn around. The smaller their readership gets, the less relevant and essential the times becomes. The times has a chance of making the subscription service work because it’s the paper of record. But if it stays on that model, it won’t be the paper of record for long.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
See your point, but the BBC is funded by the state, as well as an added “license fee” when Britons buy TV sets. Not really comparable to a private entity like the Times.
True if the question is “why does the Times feel like they need to charge?” Not true if the question is “why would a significant number of people pay $60 a year to access the Times online when the BBC site is free?”
July 10th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
The plural of bus is not bus’.
July 10th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
$5/mo. seems fair, and there’s lots of stuff outside straight news that makes the NYT worth reading.
The Reader sounds dumb, but it’s understandable.
so what’s the point? Prevent me from copying text?
Bingo.
July 10th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
A side point: how many WSJ/Economist online subs are itemized as a tax-deductible business expense? I’d guess a lot. The NYT is more difficult to classify, though I’m sure plenty of $5/monthers would expense it.
July 10th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
I agree that this could wreak havoc on the Times’ relevance. Sure Yglesias might still link to the NYT article in question, but the non-subscribers wouldn’t bother clicking since we know it’s walled. And then we’d complain to Matt, which would lead to Matt linking to non-walled sources instead of the Times article.
That is, unless they took up the WSJ model, which seems pretty satisfactory. “Walled” content would still be freely available through news aggregators and much of it could be linked to by bloggers without it being behind the wall. If they were willing to do it that way, I’d actually be MORE willing to pay $5/month than if they just annoyingly walled off all their content.
I still think the better/best model would be to use micropayments to charge per piece. Matt can link to some blockbuster investigation in the Times, and I can be set up to quickly pay 25 cents to read the thing if I’m interested. I might even pay more than $5/month under that system and would be happier to do so.
July 10th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
I believe the plural of Yglesias is Yglesii in the Nominative.
July 10th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
I’m sure you’ve written about this before, but I have to ask, where do you plan on getting your news once the Times, Post Tribune, Inquirer, etc. are gone? I seriously don’t think people realize what they’ll be missing until it’s gone. (”Hey! I hear something happened today in that Iraq country!”)
July 10th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I’m sure you’ve written about this before, but I have to ask, where do you plan on getting your news once the Times, Post Tribune, Inquirer, etc. are gone?
In so many ways right now (and not just the media), this country is Wile E. Coyote running on empty air. I have no idea what it will look like after the inevitable comic plunge–I just hope I can find enough to eat.
July 10th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
I gotta say I have no intentions of paying. I get enough info of what’s going on in the world through blogs and other news websites. Now I know most blogs are leaching off of other “straight” newsgathering sources…
But the news gathering/creation business is so currently so redundant (ie ap, reuters, cnn, etc.) that I suspect it may be a bit inefficient. I suspect that the loss of a few of these sources may actually help clarify the market.
I don’t know where things are going, but until it becomes blatantly obvious (and I fear it will take some high-profile bankruptcies, not just crying poor) that news can’t be given away for free I’m not paying for any paper – and definitely not a paper from a city that I’ve visited twice.
July 10th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
My wife and I have daily delivery of the Times. We need it for theatre listings etc. However, if we could do without it we would because the Times does not respect its readers. Among the examples of this:
1) lying the US into the Iraq war;
2) constantly covering uo Israeli crimes (then again, alot of the readership probably likes that);
3) employing Brooks et al;
4) eliminating the Sunday TV section.
July 10th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
but I have to ask, where do you plan on getting your news once the Times, Post Tribune, Inquirer, etc. are gone?
There are several hundred quality news sites in the English speaking world alone. Think about it: the US alone has several dozen reasonably high quality newspapers. Add in the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, South Africa, etc. Add in BBC.com, CNN.com, Reuters.com, MSNBC.com, Economist.com, etc. I bet we could come up with several hundred — let’s call it 300. Even if 90% of these sites are “gone” (very unlikely, I’d say, but who knows) that would still leave 30 sites, plus innumerable blogs, plus cable TV, broadcast TV, and radio. And that’s not even counting the numerous (and sure to grow) English version sites of the non-anglophone world.
Indeed in such a scenario the survivors are likely to be even more robust and healthier than in the days when they had so much more competition. There seriously is zero chance any time in the foreseeable future we’re going to have trouble finding free quality news websites, much less extant quality news websites.
I think comprehensiveness and depth are bigger concerns, as newspaper publishers cut costs to grapple with declining profits, but even here I don’t see much in the way of serious danger even for news junkies like me, mostly because publishers will probably engage in more specialization, and partly because increasingly skilled amateurs will be doing more and more quality journalism (and putting it on the web for free) just for the fun of it. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather live in world where the NY Times only has three Middle Eastern bureaus — but we also have free Juan Cole at the click of a mouse — than a wold devoid of Cole featuring seven NY Times bureaus in that part of the world.
July 10th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Yglesias’?
Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. As if the other two typos in this post weren’t enough. Can you please take a Freshman Comp class at a nearby junior college to give you average English skills? Please?
July 10th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
I said, “See your point, but the BBC is funded by the state, as well as an added “license fee” when Britons buy TV sets. Not really comparable to a private entity like the Times.”
spoy check billy said:
True if the question is “why does the Times feel like they need to charge?” Not true if the question is “why would a significant number of people pay $60 a year to access the Times online when the BBC site is free?”
I was responding directly to Matt saying “(BBC) don’t charge anything and show no sign of ever needing to charge.” Well yes, because it’s funded by taxpayers and TV license fees. It’s not applicable to the New York Times. And if you think the Beeb’s website is anywhere near as comprehensive as the Times on news and issues in this country..well first it isn’t, and second, if the US has to rely on foreign corporations for news, it’s a sorry-ass thing. If you dislike/don’t read the NYT, fine, but yes theres many of us who would pay $60 a year to keep it from extinction. It’s a fine goddamned paper, and maybe some of us could refrain from bitching about Judith Miller or lapses, and see the excellence in ten thousand other things the Times covers, every day. I’m a liberal, but I don’t expect it to be parroting my views back to me.
Could they have been more skeptical in the runup to the Iraq war? Yes, along with every other damn US media organ. It is THE great American newspaper, still- every other paper seems provincial in comparison, and its loss would leave a giant hole in what’s left of American journalism.
July 10th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
$60.00 a year? No thanks.
July 11th, 2009 at 12:32 am
I’d gladly pay $5/mo just to read Kuruguman-sensei.
July 11th, 2009 at 1:28 am
Huh? Merit pay was never intended to address job creation. Though your statement is so vague I’m not really sure what jobs you’re talking about.
Kristof never said they were good, just that they were better than rummaging through garbage as a way of making a living.
I know of no such Kristof. Even 2003 Kristof said this:
But of course the fact that Kristof is soft on inconvenient realities excuses us for ignoring all the clearly mainstream-liberal causes he promotes.
July 11th, 2009 at 1:34 am
Same place I already get it from when conventional journalists are not an option. Huffington Post.
July 11th, 2009 at 7:59 am
[...] Matt Yglesias, however, injects a note of sober economic analysis: A big part of the selling point of The New York is that it’s “the best newspaper in the world.” I can see why you would pay money to read the best newspaper in the world. But why would you pay money to read the sixth-best newspaper in the world? [...]
July 11th, 2009 at 9:48 am
The NYT is the journalistic analogue of the “food” that so proudly proclaims that it has no calories.
July 11th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Duh. The answer is to make it that anyone can read the times, but the to link to it requires a $100 a month subscription. Call it a bloggers tax.
July 12th, 2009 at 12:42 am
In the real world, advertisers usually get paid by the companies they promote, rather than charged.
July 12th, 2009 at 5:34 am
“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.”
Which is understandable given that the TimesReader subscription, which you suggest you use, already costs 3 times that amount.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
If the NY Times starts charging online readers $5 a month? Then I won’t be reading their pukingly stupid reports on how much affluent people are suffering during the coming depression.
Because anyone who would pay to read that shit is pukingly stupid, too.