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NY Times writes its own obituary
September 12, 2005 | 11:17 pm
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By Roger Sperberg, New York Editor for TeleRead
The notice was on the front page of The New York Times, announcing the paper’s imminent ritual act of suicide. Most of the most-interesting parts of the Times will now be closed off from the general internet. Instead of letting everyone see the best of the paper, the paper’s owners have concluded they will live in a gated community by restricting its goodies to a tiny fraction of its readers.
“On Monday, Sept. 19, NYTimes.com will launch a new subscription service, TimesSelect, an important step in the development of The New York Times,” is how the obituary began. Only those who pay $49.95 a year or subscribe to the obsolete print version will have online access to the columnists in Op-Ed, Business, New York/Region and Sports.
The paper added defensively that “all of our news, features, editorials and analysis will remain free to readers of NYTimes.com, as will our interactive graphics, multimedia and popular video minutes.” These are the parts of the paper that compete against — to name some of the papers I read online daily or weekly — Yahoo News, The Washington Post, the Sacramento Bee, the Newark Star-Ledger, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, and the International Herald-Tribune, as well as print versions of NPR and KEYE Austin, and headlines from the NY Daily News and Newsday, and not notably to the Times’ advantage.
Being online enables all these papers and the whole world of others to compete against the Times in its home geographical area, something that wasn’t possible in pre-Internet days. WIth the times deracinating itself and making itself less interesting, I suppose I and other Times readers will have to switch to newspapers that offer more to us. That won’t be much of a burden, admittedly, since it just means clicking on another bookmark.
And so we write, as with all journalistic obituaries, a final -30- for the great online Times, now “Off the Web.” Farewell.
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Comments:
On the other hand, this probably means we won’t be seeing links like “NYTimes (free reg. required)” on sites like Slashdot any more, and hopefully story submitters will turn to less restrictive news sources which don’t require registration. I wonder if NY Times articles will still be available via Google News?
I suspect (on scant evidence) that a huge majority of their current readers are nonpaying online customers. Shutting them out will tend to snip off a very biased demographic sample: almost all the young, smart people; academics; techies; bloggers.
I forget how the Times say they feel about Richard Florida’s “creative class” schtick: pro, or con?
I don’t read the NYT’s columnists; I do read their news stories daily.
The news is still going to be available without charge, at least according to this year’s plan. I predict few people will sign up for their plan.
There may come a time when ALL the news outlets charge for the news, however. What do we do then, start our own online news center?
It’s not clear to me whether the Times will still require registration for the “accessible” segments of the paper. What is clear is that so many of the parts that make the paper distinctive won’t be there. Sure, work from reporters like Francis X. Clines and Kurt Eichenwald will be there, but you know, many, many papers have good reporters. The Times doesn’t have an exclusive on that.
Will fans pay to read New York Times’ columnists?
No… but if the Times really wants a new revenue source, may we suggest charging to keep certain columnists OUT of the paper?
Hold your horses, everyone – you missed this part:
“As part of TimesSelect, The Times is also opening up its vast archive of articles reaching back 25 years and eventually back to the paper’s founding in 1851. TimesSelect subscribers can read up to 100 articles from the archive a month. For many years our readers have asked for seamless access to The Times’s historical archive, and we are now making this available as part of TimesSelect.”
So it’s not just a matter of paying to read one paper a day; it’s paying for access to 6 * 50 * 155 papers. That’s a totally different proposition. As a paper of record, the NYT is going to be pitching to libraries worldwide. Every serious university and many high schools and colleges are going to want a subscription. I don’t know if they’ve done the right thing, but I don’t think we can just write them off yet. They’re mining a very valuable resource.
I’d be very surprised if these libraries did not already subscribe to the print edition of the Times, which provides them with automatic access to this archive. So this doesn’t really bring them any revenue, or add any readers.