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NYTimes Skimmer

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5 pointstdonia6 comments

It's funny, but I'm already starting not to care about the NYT now that they've announced they're going to implement a paywall. I didn't realize it till I saw this headline, but when I read it I noticed I was thinking "Oh, well, news about new NYT features is no longer relevant to me." I'd never made a conscious decision not to pay for the NYT. From their point of view, it was something even worse: I'd never even considered paying. When they announced they were going to charge, I implicitly wrote them off. I took it for granted that once the NYT disappeared (which is how I thought of it), I'd be getting my news from somewhere else.

The funny thing is, paying for the NYT would be no problem for me financially. The reason I'd never considered paying is that it just didn't seem conceivable to pay for content. There's information you have to pay for, like research reports, but buying that sort of thing is a whole different category in my mind. Maybe I could be trained to think of news as something one pays for, but I can't see how. No paywall has done that so far.

It is even funnier- the NYT seems to want credit for implementing a paywall without the revenue. The announced the wall goes up in 2011, and in web time scales that is equivalent to "some day in the future." Likely they need some excuse to put a fictitious "anticipated revenue stream" into their income projections (to boost growth and the price of their stock) but even they know the paywall will not work (so they don't want to actually have it up).

I've found that my interest in their content has waned as a function of design delivery decisions they've made - specifically in their RSS feeds and their igoogle widget. This has led me to a certain fascination with their ux experiments - some of them are very interesting but not immediately profitable (I.e. their use of data driven reporting in article specific interactive tools & their google stories experiments ) while others like their Netflix most watched lists seems like paid & placed content. This skimmer in particular seems like something they'd develop for a portable experience but I can't tell for what device.

All that is a roundabout way of saying in my mind there are two parts to the new business of news - what gets produced and how it's delivered. Services like daylife have taken a stab at the delivery equation & places like the guardian have applied interesting approaches to developing editorial with tech - but the economist in print is still the best subway read for me right now and the only one I subscribe to. I expect that to change.

People probably won't pay for access to wire reports, but they might pay for longer form texts. Shanda, the company that just acquired MochiMedia, runs a paywall business called Shanda Literature in China. That's more like novels and comics I think, but the model might work.

Out of curiosity, do you subscribe to _any_ magazines, or do you generally only view freely available content online? I ask because I subscribe to The Economist and The New Yorker (and love them both), but I could see dropping them if I had a free digital medium I enjoyed as much as the print editions.

almost sort of works on the Nexus One (links don't have the proper hit states; typography gets bizarre; attempting to zoom in activates an article). Curious as to how it does on the iPhone and given it's sponsored (today at least) by Blackberry, how it does there.

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