Oh New York Times, I know you’re having trouble making ends meet. I know it’s hard to keep up with the costs of dead trees and top notch journalists, but bringing back the pay wall in 2011? Are you kidding? You just want to cut off your links to spite your paper don’t you? Like Mashable said…
The company says that more details about the metered model will be revealed over the next few months. But let’s quickly look at what it almost certainly won’t do: attract links. Anyone who links to a New York Times article will get complaints by many readers that the link doesn’t work. It’ll be much easier and future-proof to find another source and link to them.
It’s also very doubtful that it will attract new readers: yes, some people will subscribe. But most people will simply click on NYTimes stories while they’re free, and stop clicking when they hit a paywall. The metered model (from what we know now) is not a horrible solution, but it’s not a revolutionary one, either. It’s just enough to keep NYTimes afloat.
link: CONFIRMED: New York Times to Start Charging for Website in 2011
I hope that whomever buys the Canwest pubs doesn’t think this is a really, really great idea. To be truthful, I don’t have the foggiest idea of what the NYT, WSJ or any other paper should do in these changing times.
The irony of the internet is that while we don’t expect to pick up a Vancouver Sun or any other paper up off the newsstand and walk away; you have to pay for it. But since the culture of the Internet has been to have everything online for free, we expect that newspapers would be free. Even worse, when papers put up pay walls, we turn our backs on those papers, and the people who write for them, and scurry for free content elsewhere. I am no less guilty than anyone else. I don’t remember when was the last time I bought a paper. I often will accept the free ones being handed out, but truthfully even then I rarely make it through the entire paper before it hits the blue bin.
There is chatter about would you pay for an article if it was one click and painless. I’d said yes, if it’s free forever, and for everyone. Hmm, that doesn’t make sense, does it. See if I’m going to read through an article there is a better than 50-50 chance that I might want to a) use it later for something that I’m working on (say a book) or b) write a post about it (or source it). I can’t really do either of those things if the article goes poof even if I pay for it.
So again we’re stuck…
Unless Mashable, GigaOM, RWW, Techcrunch, and the Huffington Post all want to scoop up the writers from all the papers…
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