Starting in September it’s likely you’ll find the New York Times playing a much smaller role on Internet weblogs and the overall conversation for a reason: it now wants money for it to participate.
Starting in September, Salon reports, the Times is going to offer — or should we say “require” — TimesSelect to get its columnists online. These columnists have played a key role in many of the Internet “discussions” that weblogs epitomize — and starting in September you’ll have to pay for them:
But will readers care about the Times’ columnists if they’ve got to pay for the punditry? The paper is betting that they will. On Monday, the New York Times Co. announced that beginning in September, Times columns will no longer be available free on the Web. News stories, however, will remain free to readers. The paper will charge $49.95 per year for TimesSelect, a service that gives readers online access to the work of a few select writers — columnists on the Op-Ed page as well as in other sections of the paper, including Business, Sports, and Metro. TimesSelect subscribers will also receive unlimited access to the Times’ archives (most of the articles fall into the archives after one week online) and to the paper’s NewsTracker service.
Prediction: some folks will pay for it, but most people who have weblogs — including some very influential people — won’t. Why?
- There is just too much GOOD STUFF being done by other papers as well out there. It will quite easily replace the Times, and will lower the paper’s profile on the Internet even though its news stories will likely still be linked and cited.
- There is an assumption behind this that even people who love X or Y Times columnist will find hard to swallow: that somehow political and/or life cannot go on without Paul Krugman, David Brooks or Maureen Dowd. This is an almost subliminal message. And many people will want to send the Times its own message which is: in your dreams.br />
- Many people, bloggers in particular, will not want to see this experiment succeed because of what it would do to materials on the Internet in general. Why would they want to pay money so the Times can have a bottom line statement that this is the way to go?
Salon notes that paid content is not unprecedented — it’s just the way the Times is doing it:
The Times is not the first major newspaper to charge for access to its articles online — the Wall Street Journal instituted an online subscription service in the early days of the Web — but its model does represent a novel split between free and paid content. Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations, explained that the Times wants to have its cake and eat it too. The paper’s Web site is one of the most popular news destinations online and it has proved tremendously attractive to online advertisers; in the first quarter of the current fiscal year, the Times Co.’s Internet ad revenue grew by almost 30 percent. That is the cake Nisenholtz wants to keep.
And the financial bottom line is what the paper is focused on here, not on Internet profile or overall “influence”:
“We need to have a stable revenue base,” said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the Times Co. chairman and the paper’s publisher. “Online ad growth has been spectacular and long may it continue to be spectacular, but once it becomes mature it becomes cyclical, and you’ll have valleys as well as peaks. You need the stability of another revenue source.” Media analysts have speculated that the Times’ decision may have something to do with its declining print circulation, but Nisenholtz said that the move was not really in response to what’s happening to the physical newspaper. Times executives said they don’t expect TimesSelect to drive people to subscribing to the paper — which costs around $600 a year — though they noted that TimesSelect will be free for all print subscribers.
If you slice it all away all this means the Times columnists are going to go way down in their visibility. Unless some folks feel the earth simply will not move in its axis without them.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.