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The Times Seeks Irrelevance
The NY Times has decided to start charging for a portion of their content, including op-ed and news colummns. This is part of an attempt to secure a new business model to replace waning paper subscriptions for newspapers nationwide. They will charge $50/year for access to the columns, as well as their archives (which they already charged for).
I guess the NYT hopes to equal the influence of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has been secured behind a pay-required screen for years. How many of you have read a WSJ editorial lately? The only time I read one is when a subscriber quotes a snippet of one on their blog.
With the emergence of blogs as the new op-ed columnists, this decision will cement the NY Times' fate as irrelevant. As a regular reader of the Times, and someone who has frequently read and linked to their op-ed pages (Paul Krugman, for example), I will now be unable to do so.
This is certainly a poor decision with regard to the Times' position in daily political discourse, but is it a good business decision? I could just pay the 50 bucks and continue to read the content and link away (of course, almost nobody could follow the links). I am sympathetic to the plight of newspapers struggling to find a new way to fund their work, but for an international paper like the Times, the model that makes most sense is an advertising one. In particular, their op-ed pages drive a lot of traffic to their site, which in turn creates ad impressions that result in revenue. Their op-eds are often their most emailed stories as well. This move will cause a huge drop in traffic. Will the $50 subscriptions make up the difference?
I think a subscription model makes more sense for smaller, independent, and local newspapers and magazines. While I'd still prefer free access with ad-driven revenue streams for most sites, a small paper has a small clientele that might be willing to pay for the content.
The local paper is a good example of a site that might survive in this model. The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette has one of the worst online sites on the internet. They only post five stories/day, with no op-ed. They delay posting of their content until after 2pm each day in hopes of avoiding the loss of sales for their paper version. Their search engine is pitiful. They are missing the future. However, I continue to go back and forth on my traditional subscription because of two things: their monopoly on information vs. the wasted paper that piles up in my house (most of which goes unread because it's repetitive national AP content). If the paper charged less for their online version (and it was a quality site with full content, no ads, RSS feeds, etc.), then I would probably cough up the dough.
I do pay $20/year for my Salon subscription. I enjoy reading the independent content, and feel like I'm getting something there I can't get anywhere else. However, I rarely link to a Salon article, nor do I even forward them on to friends, because they can't read the content without their own subscription.
Choosing the subscription model takes oneself out of the public discourse. You might have thought joining the discussion was the point, but here in wonderful capitalist America it was really just to make money.
More reason to read the blogs.
Posted on May 17, 2005 08:12 AM
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