BuzzMachine

Great post, Jeff.

I am currently doing battle with the conservative minded folk at the South China Morning Post, who currently have a whopping great wall round most of their website – far worse than even the New York Times was.

I’ve emailed them to ask them to read your post.

Feel free to email me with any additional information.

Great post, Jeff, I’m been waiting to hear confirmation about this story.

I agree that the WSJ and Economist need to remove all cash barriers with the proviso that they maintain the quality of their reporting. If it means laying off their staff as economic justification, then I’d rather pay the subscription fees.

In a way, the WSJ is moving incrementally towards free-as-in-free-beer online journalism, by allowing open access to their blogs. Their healthcare blog is a wonderful resource.

A great synopsis. I am glad to be getting Mo MoDo again. They were only cutting off their nose by restricting access to their most identifiable brand feature.

Jeff,

I admire you and your analysis a great deal but I think you’ve jumped to too much of a sweeping generalization here, and it’s one we will surely see a lot of from the other bloggers who cover, as you do, Big Media.

Before the “paid content is dead” bandwagon picks up too much steam here’s one contrary view to hopefully be heard above the celebratory horn honking and cymbal crashing.

The decision by the Times to drop its subscription firewall proves nothing about whether all content on the web should be free or paid for. It is relevant only to the economics of Big Media, and in that context it is indeed a wise decision, for all of the reasons you cite.

The Times will certainly make more money by opening up its highly regarded op-ed columns and archives, driving more Googlejuice to its range of content overall, increasing audience size, and thus generating more from advertising and sponsorship than it would have from subscriptions. The decision enables the Times to gain the full benefit of the broad scale of its content and audience. Times Select ran contrary to this, reducing the scale of the opportunity for the Times, which after all is fundamentally a business built on scale.

This is not true for all content businesses, many of which are highly specialized and are not commoditized as most Big Media tend to be. “Content must be free” just doesn’t ring true for publishers that provide unique, actionable and measurably valuable content targeted at well-defined niches. This does not describe Big Media but it does describe the many thousands of industry newsletters, hobbyist publications, health letters and many other publishers.

The web is full of these niche, specialist sites and many of them do very well indeed with a subscription model — far better than they would from advertising — and the Times’ decision today will have zero significance for them.

As you are an advocate not only for the future of Big Media but also for the future of journalism, I would expect your position to be more nuanced. What’s good for Big Media on the web is not necessarily good for journalism. Journalists deserve to be paid for their work and sometimes that work is so unique, valuable and non-replicable that it justifies payment and the audience is glad to pay it because the content is worth it to them.

It goes without saying that it is up to the content creator to deliver content that is worth paying for, and if they cannot then they deserve to be commoditized or cannibalized.

This incessant drumbeat that “all content must be free” does no service to the many journalists and publishers who need to enjoy the proceeds of their work in whatever form is most appropriate. It is a blunt, non-discriminating sentiment that if widely accepted would make it that much harder for smaller, specialized publishers to earn money from their efforts. In a perverse way, this would be good for Big Media as it would undermine media diversity and thus competition.

Not all content always deserves to be free.

Best wishes,
Evan

What a lot of hoo-ha over nothing.

The Times decided they could make more money selling their content to advertisers than to users. The tv networks figured that out 60 years ago.

This is news?

If the Times had a nickel for every time I clicked on a link to their site – and realized I had to pay, and then quickly hit “back”… well they’d have a lot of money. But needless to say, I never found it essential to pay so all those nickels never got to the Times.

1851 to 1923 = Public Domain
1923 to 1986 = Associated cost to digitize
1986 on, already digital.

No committee. Just reality.

I guess the Times figures now that their credibility is totally shot – outside their Myrmidonian tribe – that they can now safely release the errata euphemized as “archives”.

Jeff, shouldn’t they open comment threads on the archives? That would seem to be the crux of facilitating “conversation”, would it not?

Not to look backward here, but this is the television model — content is free for users, paid for by advertisers. (Similar to the way most magazines work, where subscription fees cover postage costs and not much else. How else could you get Esquire for $8/year?) In order for this to work, online ad revenue has to increase exponentially. What no one seems willing to admit is that unrestricted public access to newspapers’ websites is largely subsidized by those papers’ print subscribers and advertisers.

For newspapers, print ad revenue is dropping and online ad revenue is increasing, but the actual dollar amounts paint a grim picture. In Q2 2007, online ad revenue was $796 million. Print ad revenue was $10.5 billion. Physical production and distribution sure as hell don’t solely account for that difference.

Either online advertising has to get much more expensive (or frequent), or reporters have to suffer huge layoffs and salary cuts and we, as a result, will be left with lower quality coverage and less of it. Something’s got to give. “Free content” sounds great, but it ain’t gonna come free. If, as you write, the relationship between a newspaper or magazine and its readers is so valuable to advertisers, why isn’t that value reflected in online ad rates?

Another concern is that news content could follow the downward trend of television content, and we’re left with the equivalent of cheaply produced reality shows and sensational, marginally revelant local news and all the “quality” content still costing money (eg, HBO & Showtime).

How come the NYT is still charging for the online crossword puzzle?

Jeff,

Your post is interesting as always, but I question where you get your notion that advertisers never wanted to be on opinion pages. It’s true that they rarely HAVE been on opinion pages but, in my experience as a newspaper editor, that was because we never let them be. We felt that the opinion pages (like the front page and section fronts) were brought low by advertising. We keepers-of-the-flame editors stood our ground against this incursion, wisely or not, much to the chagrin of advertising directors. So one interesting twist here is that the TimesSelect experience helped bust that old barrier.

Geneva

I am a media professor and what is still not clear to me is if there are any restrictions on accessing everyday regular NY Times material?

Do you need to be a subscriber to the newspaper?

If not, do you need to register?

I want my students to read the times and seeking to find out more….

Scott Talan

Wonderful post. Linked back to it on my blog.

Information is out there and it’s free. That is not to suggest that there is NOTHING worth paying for online, but you have to do a better job picking your spots.

The Times have again started charging to use their website.