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Comment by donohoe | Hacker News Reader

I work for the Times as a developer so I'm going to stay out of this conversation other than trying to correct or inform. I'm keeping my own opinions to myself (as best as I humanly can).

So with that said, here are 3 links I received that shed more light on this:

"A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/opinion/l18times.html

"Digital Subscriptions and Premium Products"

http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/account/purchases/subscr...

More Info

http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp0145.htm...

I hope they prove useful and informative.

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Are you still going to support http://mobile.nytimes.com ? I'd be happy to pay for a subscription, but I don't like the smartphone apps and strongly prefer reading the mobile site on my phone's browser instead.

How will you prevent me from opening the links in incognito mode?

Because that is what I do currently just to get around the nagscreen.

If you really want, there are fingerprinting techniques to uniquely identify a user without using any cookies. (e.g. combination of user agent, installed fonts, screen resolution, screen depth, city, country, ip, etc...)

So they could do it that way.

For users with NoScript, that list is reduced to user agent, IP address, and the inference that none of the other tests were allowed to run.

In other words, they could make it work, but only until they enable IPv6.

I have managed to read NYtimes for the last several years, without having an account, and primarily using bugmenot to pass around the user registration, which annoyed me to no end.

With that said, I would consider creating an account and paying, a big selling point for me, (which is not mentioned in any of the articles presented would be, that as a paying customer, it would be great if no ads are visible, just premium content.

Good work. The NY Times is, in my opinion, the best online paper by far. Navigating and reading articles is a pleasure.

Now if only the content would improve...

Oh come on, what are you basing this on? The content as compared to the vast majority of other newspapers online and print is far superior in every way imaginable. If you want to see bad please check out chron.com.

Well, the whole shilling-for-the-Pentagon-in-the-run-up-to-the-Gulf-War stink is still floating around. Also, the editorial policy of allowing the word "torture" to describe waterboarding except in instances when the US is doing the tortur...ahem, waterboarding is more than odious.

Pointing out the inferiority of less consequential papers doesn't absolve them. The point is that these guys consider themselves THE paper of record. You can't pride your self on a higher standard, then get defensive and angry when people actually hold you to it.

Long time coming. Great product and great service. They're fighting for the survival of the paradigm.

Long time coming. Great product and great service. They're fighting for the survival of the paradigm.

What is that paradigm? I think some news outlets, mostly business, have proven people are willing to pay for valuable news, the WSJ comes to mind.

The NY Times has a mix of hard news and soft opinions, their main problem is that almost the same news is available from many free sources around the Internet.

So I am genuinely perplexed as to what the paradigm is?

The paradigm is one news outlet having reporters all over the country and the world covering things that may or may not make ripples in financial markets, but may be just as or more important. It's one outlet having the breadth to well cover a breaking event with disparate news aspects (the Japan earthquake being a good example) that touch all manners of people and businesses across the globe. Every decent-sized metro daily used to have bureaus in Beirut, Israel, Egypt, etc. There are plenty of reasons, some of them good, that this is no longer the case. The New York Times is one of the last vestiges of that age and I don't think that nostalgia is the only reason we should root for its success.

The only thing that guarantees that success, as Rupert Murdoch has pointed out, is sustainable profitability. I think the Times' move to charge people for their coverage will ultimately be successful, just as the efforts of the FT and WSJ have been and, to a degree, as NPR's has been.

$420 a year for full access (online only).

At the top bracket. At its lowest, its $195.

http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/account/purchases/subscr...

You're selling yourself short though--at the lowest it's actually free, just like, you know, every other freemium model on the web.

Dude, get out of there. I worked at another place that stole a lot of your developers and they all hated that place. Old media is a dying breed. Get out while you can.

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