Starting on March 28, the New York Times will start demanding between $195 and $455/year from Web readers (more than the Wall Street Journal, but I guess that makes sense since the WSJ serves so many low-income readers). As reading the newspaper is a waste of time for all but a handful of Americans, e.g., Congress, the President, and their respective staffs, I am predicting a large boost in American productivity. A workforce that has up-to-the-minute information about events on the other side of the globe is… a workforce that should probably have spent that time doing work. If you don’t own a fighter jet, what’s the value of learning about proposed no-fly zones in Libya? If you aren’t a member of Congress or one of their fatcat donors who can get a Senator on the phone, what’s the value of learning in real-time about a debate over a new law?
This is not an argument against learning about the world. I don’t think it is a waste of time to read New Yorker magazine, for example, or go to the library and get a book on the Collapse of 2008. But that’s different than breathlessly trying to keep up with the fragments of information as published by a newspaper. In fact, for many stories I prefer to check the Wikipedia page where the relevant facts have been accumulated.
A very productive friend who has written numerous books says “Don’t read the newspaper in the morning; the bits of disconnected information will scatter your brain and you won’t get any work done for the rest of the day.” So the New York Times is doing us all a huge favor by walling off their content. Let’s hope all of the other newspapers follow!
[Amusingly, the Times, which in the past has had difficulty with basic HTML navigation and hyperlinking, says that they are going to use Canadians as unpaid testers for their incompetently written code: “The 20-article limit begins immediately for readers accessing NYTimes.com from Canada, which allows the company time to work out any software issues before the system begins in the United States and the rest of the world.”]
NYT paywall got you down? It’s pretty easy to avoid by
1: entering the headline into google
2: clicking on link
This has worked for years, and they’d be insane not to continue to allow google to index their articles. Google has a long standing requirement that whatever you show the googlebot (web crawler) you show to users clicking through from google. But, yeah, once you’re on the site, another article might require a trip back to google.
“The last two Tribunes I have not looked at. I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire, — thinner than the paper on which it is printed, — then those things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.” From an April 1853 entry in one of Thoreau’s journals. Until a year and a half ago I got home delivery of the daily & Sunday NYT here in Mpls. It got too expensive for me to justify given the near-zero interest on my retirement savings (a negative Federal Reserve-imposed “tax” on the prudent to save the imprudent). In cost-benefit terms, I couldn’t justify the price, even though I loved reading it every day & enjoyed free access as a subscriber to their archives. The benefits of not subscribing? For one, I read more books, which I buy by the bag at library used-book sales and at my nearby Half-Price Books used book store. I occasionally read NYT articles on-line now (via the NYT headlines on my “My Yahoo” page, which is where I get Phil G.’s headlines, too). Possibly if I had an i-Pad or a Kindle I might subscribe, but I won’t right now & don’t see the need to. I’m guessing in the future they may launch tiered services that might entice the likes of me — after the first-users sign on.
Philip, you sounded just like Neil Postman there for a moment! 🙂
What I wonder is what technology they use to enforce this. You can cookie the user’s browser, the user can delete their cookies. You can store the IP, not that that is a very effective way to track people anyway, and the user can reset their router and get a new IP (at least I can). How will this be done? I’m not going to pay them, I have a vested interest in seeing them go out of business and Roger Ailes buying them at auction for about ten bucks.
I have no doubt that both the pricing level and the complex set of device-based tiers are the product of highly-paid consultants who are highly qualified, by virtue of their MBAs and pin-striped suits. Those consultants carefully tailored the scheme to meet the exacting needs of the Wall Street analysts who set the quarterly performance goals for the New York Times Corporation.
The brilliance of the consultants’ strategy is instantly obvious to anyone who also possesses an MBA and the appropriate quota of pin-striped suits. The very fact that it’s incomprehensible to lesser mortals indubitably proves the infallibility of both the strategy and its creators. It can’t possibly fail.
The strategy is based on the proven principle of weeding out undesirables. The key is to make the majority of people who now faithfully read the Times Web site disappear in disgust over what they consider an absurdly high price for a subscription. The deceptive four-week billing cycle intentionally heightens the disgust, especially when it bamboozles many people into underestimating the annual price. But this is a good thing, essential to the future success of the Times!
The number of people who subscribe will, by design, be MUCH smaller than what they might get by charging a reasonable price. But those subscribers will create a highly exclusive demographic, sufficiently loyal and devoted to the Times that they’re willing to pay an intentionally excessive price for it. A select audience of loyal readers eager to pay inflated prices for products and services will be irresistible to high-end (and high-budget) advertisers, on whom the Times is relying for produce those spectacular quarterly results!
Of course, even the most brilliant schemes devised by the most brilliant MBAs wearing the finest pin-striped suits don’t always turn out to be spectacular successes. It’s worth noting that The Times has tried “exclusive” content before, at a price that even I, a stereotypical Jew whose financial motto is “Value For Money,” was willing to pay. But that failed. It’s possible that the Times executives didn’t actually hire consultants, but concluded by themselves that it failed because the price wasn’t high enough.
I wish the executives and shareholders of the NYTimes Corporation success. But there are a lot of soon-to-be-former NYTimes fans who relish the Schadenfreude they’ll eventually get from reading (in the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times) about the Times executives who are now unemployed after the spectacular failure of the paywall scheme drove the company into ruin.
@Ted above said it far more lyrically than I — but assuming you felt such deep loyalty to the NYT that you felt a need to pay for their news, you’re far better off getting the Weekday home delivery option which includes full digital access and simply throwing away the physical newspaper.
Direct from the NYT – this equates to $14.80 for four weeks instead of $35 for digital only access. Undoubtedly you could get a home delivery subscription even cheaper from elsewhere.
It’s this type of pricing incongruity that really kills digital access. It just makes you feel like a sucker if you subscribe direct.
Regarding Trenton’s comment, this is from the Times article announcing the new policy:
“Not all visits to NYTimes.com will count toward the 20-article limit. In an effort to reduce losses among the Web site’s more than 30 million monthly readers, The Times will allow access to people who arrive at its Web site through search engines like Google and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. There will, however, be a five-article limit a day for people who visit the site from Google.”
As a relatively unsophisticated computer user, i don’t know if there will be a way to get around this by deleting cookies, but of course one could always use another search engine. I wonder, now that it’s been revealed that Bing gets it’s results by searching Google, whether searching from Bing would somehow register as a Google search for these purposes. In any case, perhaps the 5 article limit would be a valuable self-rationing tool.
One other thing I’m wondering is, if they will in fact track your usage via cookies, what will prevent you from exceeding your limit by using multiple computers. And also, since you’ll be able to access the paper from any computer, what will prevent a group of people (of any size) from sharing a subscription, other than that only one person might be able to log in at any given time (if in fact that might be the case)?