Since college I’ve aruged that students, academics and leaders rely too much on the New York Times when there are several other excellent news sources — and now the Time’s management is going to help motivate lots of folks (particularly bloggers) to explore them:
Come Monday, Sept. 19, fans of New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, and David Brooks will have to break out their credit cards. Sept. 19 is the launch date of TimesSelect, a new subscription service designed to diversify the newspaper’s revenue stream beyond traditional Web site advertising.
The popular Op-Ed columnists are the main selling point behind the $49.95 a year subscription. (The service will be free for the paper’s home delivery subscribers). The paper’s news, features, editorials, and analysis will remain free, as will interactive graphics, multimedia, and video.
TimesSelect subscribers will also have the ability to access up to 100 articles a month from the Times’s 25-year digital archive. To sweeten the pot even further, the Times is offering a number of new services, including the ability to save and organize articles in a personal “Times File,” an e-mail alert service, and early access to certain Sunday sections.
In an editor’s letter posted Monday, NYTimes.com Editor Len Apcar called TimesSelect “an important step in the development of The New York Times.”
Sure, to it’s stockholders… MORE:
But the move is not without its risks. The Times is likely to see a drop-off in page views, which advertisers covet, at least initially. But if successful, the move could embolden other publishers to begin experimenting with limited online subscription models.
EARTH TO TIMES MANAGEMENT: You have some superb columnists. But what’s going to happen is that you’re going to lose a lot of your web-based readership which drives people to your paper. In the case of bloggers, they may have to live without your columnists but they’ll find other provocative ones at such great papers as the Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times etc.
Maybe this will even help bloggers get over their Times Addiction and explore websits of papers that also have great analysis and reporting such as The Christian Science Monitor and USA Today.
Life can go on without some of your fine columnists, and we suspect this move means you’re shooting yourselves in the foot (or a bit lower, to the back, but just turn the other cheek when the pain hits). This just means fewer quotes, fewer links — fewer people who don’t live in New York reading your newspaper.
We agree with this article’s quote from John Aravosis, too:
Early response in the blogosphere was not positive. One popular blogger, John Aravosis at Americablog, predicted what many fans of Times’ columnist might do: “People will still get copies of the articles, they’ll still email them around the Net, some Web sites will still republish the entire articles illegally, and we’ll end up linking to those sites instead of the New York Times (it ain’t illegal to link).”
He added, commenting on “free” falling: “If the Times’ idea catches on, this really could be the beginning of the end of the current state of Internet news.”
Yes, and it could catch on. But, in the meantime, there are other papers with other columnists who’ve perhaps been ignored as too many people relied on the Times because it is the Times.
PS: We won’t be subscribing. We’ll still buy your paper when we see it on the newsstands here in San Diego and when we travel. We’ll happily buy MD’s next book. But, no, we’ll pass on the fee and find other columnists to share with readers on this site in the future.
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.