New York Times paywall goes up January 2011 | Hacker News Reader

New York Times paywall goes up January 2011

mashable.com

20 pointsjrwoodruff22 comments

I don't know. It sounds like a pretty reasonable system to me. Information wants to be free, but fair accurate reporting certainly is not.

Free as in speech, not as in beer.

When Murdoch announced that the Times of London would become a subscriber-only site, my reaction was "there's no way I'm paying for the same news I can get anywhere". With the NYT, I'm not so sure. There's still the basic issue of the gulf between "free" and "not free" regardless of price, but the NYT does things that I just don't see anywhere else.

If I were Bill Keller, I'd be thinking seriously about how much value traditional news actually adds to a paid product. I certainly place very little value in reading regurgitated wire feeds and press releases. Come to think of it, I'd be far more inclined to pay for the New Yorker, Salon or Slate than the NYT. Hmmm.

It's only a partial paywall. A redirect, referer change or resetting cookie file would be able to fix their broken website when the time comes.

If you read their articles enough to hit the paywall, why not just pay to support the product they're creating?

Information wants to be free.

Journalists are the ones who free that information in the first place. The less remunerative that career is, the less information there will be. I think it helps to consider your subscription to be more of a donation than payment for a product. Then again, I work for a non-profit news organization. (Feel free to donate.)

Libre, not gratis.

Partly because the news isn't the product, the audience is. And partly because it's too annoying. It'd be just another thing demanding attention. Unless their journalism magically becomes way more valuable to me, I'd just leave. There's already too much news to assimilate.

The real irony is that the customers who're loyal enough to hit the paywall are the last ones the NYT should be charging. They're already paying attention in spades. Punish your real fans. That's the ticket.

"Partly because the news isn't the product, the audience is."

This doesn't make sense in the context you're using it in. If a company makes all of its money from ads, then sure, the audience provided to advertisers is the product. In this case, the Times is asking for the readers to pay money to read news, which pretty clearly makes the news the product.

Most of the investigative journalism that has a national impact seems to originate from the New York Times and the Washington Post. If that isn't valuable to you, you're not paying attention.

The NYT online does make all its money on advertising. The current reality is that we are the product.

> Most of the investigative journalism that has a national impact seems to originate from the New York Times and the Washington Post. If that isn't valuable to you, you're not paying attention.

This is an argument from authority, or something. "Big, respectable, nationally impactful investigative journalism." (like cheerleading the Iraq War?) Nowadays, we can get the facts from a hundred other sources, and the situation on the ground is more likely to show up on Twitter first, raw and undiluted.

You can argue about the definition of "the product" all you want, but you're not explaining what your point is. You're making it seem like they're charging people to see ads. I'm fairly certain they'll make more money from the paywall fee than the ads for a given user.

You don't have to take my word for their impact. http://www.pulitzer.org/

RE: Iraq War — I never said they were perfect.

> I'm fairly certain they'll make more money from the paywall fee than the ads for a given user.

And I'm betting the paywall will never go up. Eight months is a long time. But this is all hypothetical. I suppose we could take it to longbets.com, for kicks :)

> You don't have to take my word for their impact. http://www.pulitzer.org/

I'm really not trying to pick a fight, but you do realize that's another argument from authority, right?

I linked to the Pulitzer site to give you lists of articles that you might find valuable, not as proof of their value.

It will.

Not true. NYT makes most of its money from ads, but also from archives, content licensing (Amazon etc), indexing, and things like online crosswords.

Second, you might get it first on Twitter or whatever but you wont always know until later if its true, the context, and the other side of the story. Twitter wins for earthquake in Haiti but if a General is shot in Thailand I need to know more about the what, who, why, where the than some dude I never heard of is shot.

My 2 cents

Well, just to be clear, my point isn't that the NYT doesn't create value -- they absolutely do. My point is that the paywall won't work. It's a band-aid at best when they need a tourniquette. The only thing they'll achieve is to further remove themselves from the conversation. People just aren't going to start paying for news -- at least not enough of them to make a difference.

I'm not by any means rooting for the collapse of the NYT. But we're living through a revolution, and survival is going to require bigger thinking than paywalls.

I actually agree with you that the paywall will fail. Trying to get a lot of people to pay a set amount for news will yield less money than getting a limited number of people to donate an unlimited amount for news; that is, non-profit journalism. The latter is the most likely endgame, and being a part of it is pretty interesting.

http://www.texastribune.org

If you agree that the New York Times creates value, I don't understand why you're hesitant to support them as you mentioned in your initial comment.

Well, I'll borrow your phrase: They're charging people to see ads. They can have it one way or the other, but not both. It's the same reason I can't abide advertisments at the movie theater. The value that the Times creates is a little like free food in Vegas. The food may be wholesome and nutritious, but there's an alterior motive, and charging standard rates for it would yield less money for the casino in the long run. Also, that the paywall kicks in only for the most devoted readers really turns me off.

As far as non-profit journalism, I'm all for it. I would absolutely donate to a news outfit I felt was fighting the good fight. NP-journalism is forward-thinking. My only concern is that journalists' integrity not be compromised by their patron's agenda. But I suppose it couldn't be any worse than the current situation, right?

Assurance contract-like (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract) group funding of journalism is another interesting idea.

Free-agency, decentralization, online markets for stories, and ads are my view of journalism's most likely future.

I'd pay for information that helps me make money... I don't think I'd pay for information that's just a different presentation of the same news that everyone else is covering.

I WOULD however pay a subscription for Glenn Beck to be TAKEN OFF the air, and the threat of having him come back on would be enough to keep me paying regularly.

"I don't think I'd pay for information that's just a different presentation of the same news that everyone else is covering."

The New York Times does plenty of original journalism.

> "just a different presentation of the same news that everyone else is covering"

I think this sentence betrays a severe misunderstanding of both the intent and the power of journalism.

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