March 21st, 2007

On the high horse, because there’s really no other way to talk about the NYT

By matt buchanan

Unfortunately, WSN doesn’t practice commenter executions like Gawker, so I guess I’ll go with the alternative and respond.

BobH: I imagine most people who read the Times outside of NY, while they might not currently attend college, are probably recent graduates. They’re who the Times wants to read the paper, in any case. Odds are, they have a university email address. If they’re old enough that they don’t, they probably have a subscription already. Moreover, I question the value of the content the Times threw behind TimesSelect: if for some reason Maureen Dowd wrote something really important that mattered, people would discuss it elsewhere online, for free. Or maybe they wouldn’t—which is part of the reason the Times had to open up TimesSelect to as many “hundreds of thousands” as you claim actually subscribe to it. I just stopped reading anything behind the wall. Granted, I rarely read that section, anyway. David Pogue FTW.

jason [sic]: The Times is now giving the paper away for free to college students regardless by opening TimesSelect. Did you miss that point? It’s free. Right now. Online. Supposedly, this was to get more students to read the paper, and I think that’s great. However, I think they should take the next step—encourage students to read the whole paper—by making the Times Reader free as well. The web version lends itself to reading sections or articles individually, rather than the entire paper like the print version, or now, the Reader version. Like I said, they could try to get universities to license it, though I don’t know how successful such a move would be.

On a larger note, the reality is that fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for news content when it’s available for free all over the internet. It’s a reality that the Times has to adjust to, and admirably, they’re trying. But other sites have proven that the pay model rarely, if ever, works. The WSJ is an exception because a certain type of people have to read it due to the specialized information it puts out. There’s not really an option for those people. Most of the Times’ news is available online elsewhere. When it’s just one link in a list of 200 RSS feeds I pore through every day, paying for it seems out of the question, and I think that’s the impression most of the “internet generation” or whatever you want to call us, increasingly has.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 10:15 am and is filed under Opinion, Functionally Obsolete. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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