N.Y. Times Scales Back Free Articles to Get More Subscribers
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
If you read NYT articles with any regularity I strongly urge you to subscribe. For me the cost of a digital subscription is trivial relative to the value I get from it.
What we need is micropayments.
The whole thing with micropayments is that the content creator is hoping that the cost to purchase the article is going to be low enough to where the user isn't going to notice the money.
But they will notice. You're forcing a person to read a headline (and maybe a half paragraph intro) and then deciding if it's actually worth buying the article. That's a decision that the average person is not going to put up with.
The best solution is to support publications that produce consistent and high quality content. The best model for this (that we know of) is recurring payment.
Now I find myself actively avoiding most NYT links because I want to "save them" for the stories I'm really interested in which means in general I almost never click on a NYT link anymore. So now I'm wondering if I should even bother subscribing. This seems like it will make me even less likely to subscribe, especially since I don't want to reward this business tactic.
I don't want my journalist to be beholden to advertisers instead of trying to provide the most truthful, unbiased facts to their readers.
The Guardian is a bit different situation because they have the Greenwald/Snowden legacy under their belts and a general reputation for truthiness, but I struggle to see how subscribing to NYT inspires better journalism.
Is the theory that less dependence on ads would allow them to publish material on touchy subjects that would otherwise get demonized? I would like to support a cause like that but I don’t see how this would be it.
Having a curated set of articles that a physical paper gives you is nice. There are ways this can be done with digital news sources as well, but the different medium has worked out for me to help broaden the topics I read.
https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/multiproduct/lp8XKUR.ht...
A subscription service which divvys out my subscription fee to the authors (or papers?) that published the stories I read. Search by region, topic, author, paper etc. I’d pay more than I pay for Spotify and I currently pay zero for news.
It feels like I see comments like yours every other day on HN. Clearly these services need some better marketing.
I found the app hard to use. I think the problem I had with it was that it wasn't clear to me which articles are new and which are old. But I'm not sure anymore.
I was a previous subscriber, and when I wanted to unsubscribe, I discovered there was no way to do it online. This is, of course, an intentional move to make it hard to unsubscribe.
My advice to the NYT: learn from Netflix.
One was moderately annoying as the call center menu hid the ‘unsubscribe’ option about five layers deep, although once I found it I had a brief and reasonably efficient conversation to sort things out.
For the other subscription, I had an absolutely painful discussion with a woman on another continent who kept pretending to misunderstand me and offering to “suspend” my subscription for two months.
After several attempts to be reasonable and being treated like a fool, I had to raise my voice and express some anger before she suddenly became able to understand me. :(
Any future subscriptions of mine will be through a trusted third party like amazon or only with services that have proven they don’t suck at customer service.
The NYT has lost a great deal of trust from it's readers in recent years, including those of various political and social leanings. Many opposed to the growth of populist, right-wing movements in the US (and to a degree abroad) see the NYT as emblematic of a news media more interested in humanistically profiling far-right extremists, including self-avowed white nationalists, than in highlighting their evils. They also find the NYT to be a major nexus of sensationalist coverage of the Trump presidential campaign and administration, distracting from balanced and substantial coverage of the race in favor of an obsession with email scandals and essentially unimportant (but amusing or provocative) actions by Trump and his entourage. On the other side of the American political divide, many have found the 'failing' NYT to be unrepresentative of their experiences as Americans, and have begun to dismiss it's coverage as partisan and often distorted. The paper's attempts to introduce balanced coverage, especially in the editorial pages, has been met with vitriol from both liberals and conservatives. Outside of partisan politics, coverage of issues like the Las Vegas massacre have been criticized by many as sensationalizing the attack and encouraging copycats, including by academics. When the most venerated news institution in the United States cannot heed what is increasingly accepted in academia and abroad as responsible reporting procedures for mass attacks, it is concerning.
Journalism need not be free to consumers, and I personally believe it would be better off as a directly subscribed medium with little to no ad support. But this does not seem an appropriate or strategic time for a newspaper that desperately needs to rebuild its trust with readers (especially with young millennials) to ask for more subscription dollars. I have heard of many people who have cancelled or allowed to lapse subscriptions to the NYT (subscriptions I was surprised to learn they had) over the issues I've mentioned. Subscription volume may be up, but I suspect deeper trends in subscriber and nonsubscriber perceptions are at work and this change will damage the NYT in the long run. Of course, this is a fragile time for news media, especially print, and it is not surprising to see a paper opting for short-term earnings.
Take a look of Chomsky opinion about them: https://www.salon.com/2015/05/25/noam_chomsky_the_new_york_t...
We need some evidence of the level of trust and its change over time. I've read such things about the NY Times since I first learned of its existence. It seems to be the nature of journalism, telling people uncomfortable, undesirable things about red-hot issues.
That's different than uncomfortable challenging, comfort zones and so forth. Here we see misleading headlines to drive traffic.
Next, I lean left and yet found the NYT obsessively copycatting Democratic institutional thinking: supporting corrupt NY Mayors, relentlessly defending lost Presidential candidates despite nefarious behaviors, and in years past as Chomsky demonstrates, beating the drums of war in foreign policy. I found them obsessing over race and gender divides, even if it meant eclipsing greater threats. Transgender policy and statues, in. Redistribution of wealth to the rich... too complicated to obsess over.
They've run negative coverage on people I admire, like Chomsky and Sanders, because those buck the trends within a fractured Left.
Next, I live in NY and find their local coverage heavily biased with stories of the idle rich. I'd love to send examples of this, but I'm pretty sure I have one article left to read this month.
I pay for a 15 dollar a month, Kindle subscription to the Financial Times because of the thoughtful, in-depth analysis, sometimes with multiple viewpoints in different articles on one topic, and a FAR less American-centric information resource. When it comes to politics, being culturally myopic is a sin that the NYT is in my unhumble opinion guilty of.
That doesn't seem to suggest that the NYT has lost trust from all of its readers, to be honest.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/315041/new-york-times-co... [2] http://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/20... [3] http://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/20... [4] https://www.recode.net/2017/11/1/16592340/new-york-times-goa...
Many opposed to the growth of populist, right-wing movements in the US would like their newspapers to provide reporting and understanding, which can include "humanistic profiles" of people we don't like. The last thing I want from journalism (outside the opinion pages) are stories selected to highlight or build support for a particular opinion, as justified as that opinion may be.
> On the other side of the American political divide, many have found the 'failing' NYT to be unrepresentative of their experiences as Americans, and have begun to dismiss it's coverage as partisan and often distorted. The paper's attempts to introduce balanced coverage, especially in the editorial pages, has been met with vitriol from both liberals and conservatives.
IIRC, the NYT has long been regarded the voice of liberal orthodoxy. Any attempts change that (if they are in fact happening) are going to be painful but also needed and welcome (by me at least).
Yet the last year of straight Trump derangement, especially things like its relentless daily excoration of the tax bill over the past month, has finally started to chip away at my respect for the grey lady.
Americans are now the most divided along party lines since 1990s.
http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/1-partisan-divides-ov...
I think NYT are just mirroring the reality. Hiring climate change deniers as columnists, profiling neo-nazis while at the same time actually doing their job WRT Trump (compare to the Iraq War and sensational Judy Miller headlines).
> They also find the NYT to be a major nexus of sensationalist coverage of the Trump presidential campaign and administration, distracting from balanced and substantial coverage of the race in favor of an obsession with email scandals and essentially unimportant (but amusing or provocative) actions by Trump and his entourage.
Disagree. I think they are just covering the reality and sometimes go to the absurd length to remain "impartial" and give all sides to the story, no matter how ridiculous they are.
---
I agree with you WRT covering mass shootings, but perhaps it's bigger problem than journalism, so that's why it never changes. If it bleeds, it leads.
Mandatory plug for Charlie Brooker
How to cover mass shootings
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G2o1V4lX_g4
---
Also I posted this recently WRT Richard Spencer types: they are mostly attention-craving nobodies, so the media is essentially amplifying their message.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/lets-just-stop-writin...
Look at the front page right now:
Flynn pleads guilty (news, public record - the exception!)
Republicans say they'll pass the tax plan in the Senate (probably a press release or word from a PR office)
Rex Tillerson might be replaced by someone even worse than himself (probably a press release or word from a PR office, posturing)
A meta-regurgitation of sex harassment news (posturing)
Why North Korea's missile is very scary (almost certainly a statement from a public relations office in the SK government, in collaboration with the US government, since it includes a statement about a phone call between the respective heads of state)
A string of variety fluff blog posts (entertainment).
I care about quality journalism, but these articles are mostly posturing/outrage-jockeying or fluff, and what news there is consists in barfing up press releases or statements from public relations offices, spiced up with a little expert vetting from whomever they could get on the phone. It reads like a textbook dystopian "Manufacturing Consent" newspaper.
So, I don't know. I pay for a subscription to a few news outlets (a few of whom are can be just as bad as the NYTimes, such as NPR), but I certainly don't see a reason to pay a premium for name brand news that isn't any more substantive than skimming AP reports off a news feed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitra... (part of an in-depth series).
WaPo is $4 a month for the 50% of US households who have Amazon Prime. That's about a quarter of the price of what NYT is asking for, with a quality and political bent that's fairly similar. NYT can't compete until its on a much closer pricing footing.
If they had some sort of alliance with the Post and the Tribune, or something like that it would be very cool. As it is, I recently signed up for the Washington Post which means I now have to cancel the New York Times. :(
People have money to spend, but you need to offer them some better options than the current model of paying separately for every news outlet.
Earlier today HN had the article about Japanese elderly, which was a sad and wonderful read and I highly recommend it. I wish NYT had more of this long-form, thoughtful "teach me something about life elsewhere" reporting, instead of a "what crazy thing did Trump do today" tabloid-ism.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/mary-norris-di...
If you like long-form, feature-style articles instead of current events news, there is enough stuff in the NYT archives that you'd never be able to read it all.
Information wants to be free, but it's not free to gather and vet.
Strictly speaking as a consumer, Am I the only person who doesn't like subscriptions? Do the subset of masses who are willing to pay for journalism really prefer subscriptions over one time use payments? I guess i'm just weird.
I don't think Americans in general like metering. There's a lot of resistance to data caps and cell phone plans are heading towards being "unlimited." The thing that sucks about one time use payments is that you're either thinking "do I really want to pay for this little action?" all the time or you don't and get surprised by your bill.
Though I wouldn't mind paying $10/month for a subscription that included unlimited access to one major news site and up to $5/month credit for metered access to others. Unfortunately, the realities of competition will prevent that.
I don’t understand this hostility toward paywalls or paying for a subscription. Just a generation ago, most households paid for newspaper subscriptions, and even some magazines. I am happy to pay for the journalism from what I consider to be a high quality news source. It makes me a better-informed individual.
Many of the users of HN are attempting to monetize a service or product using a subscription model. Yet you don’t want to support a newspaper doing the same thing? Do you feel that the journalism should be free, or free to you? If so, why do you feel that entitlement?
News sources such as WSJ, NYT, Economist provide education and value to individuals and society, and people who earn enough to get a Starbucks on the way to work and go to the gym on the way home (also a subscription model) should not have this level of disdain for the idea of paying for content from a reputable newspaper.
Just a generation ago, most households paid for newspaper
subscriptions, and even some magazines.
I'm also wondering if there needs to be more journalism as a public good—or a nonprofit. Not tabloids or 24-hour-newscycle hysteria, but true investigative reporting.
Plenty of people would gladly pay a bit of money to get access to a day's news when they want to, without a subscription. But it has to be easy, not "type in all my credit card info to get one paper".
Deleting cookies will get you another 5 (used to be 10) "free" articles.
Also Guardian US, which is free just with nags and a terrible ADD design is a mediocre alternative.
The same applies to scientific publishers. The mission of science is to advance and disseminate knowledge, but only the elite few - the professional researchers with funding - can access scientific knowledge. Scientists complain that the public believes anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers, but then deny them access to the science.
It seems that even as late as 2017, these old institutions haven't adjusted to the Internet's free distribution; they still try to force their square old pay-for-distribution models, which made sense created when paper had to be printed and shipped, into the round holes - or maybe better, the pressureless vacuum - of the Internet. From the point of view of their missions, to disseminate knowledge, the Internet is a fantasy too good to even imagine - free, instant, global distribution to most of humanity - but still they can't see it. Perhaps institutions don't change with the times, they just die and are replaced by a new generation.
We are patiently waiting for the dinosaurs to die out. They will die. And then we'll move into their homes. - Kurt Cobain
NYT leans too far left for my tastes, I won't pay to support that. I'll read free articles (to try to gain perspective from the other side) but no way will I pay.
The problem is that's the stuff I wish the most people had easy access to, or order to build momentum to fix the problems. For instance, I post a link to their series on binding arbitration every time that comes up somewhere. That's a good example of something that doesn't sound bad until someone explains it to you.