Mother Jones - Comments for "Paying for the Times"

paying for news I read, paying for news I want others to read

I used to read the NYT almost every day. Now, in addition to having so many web-available outlets for decent coverage and niche coverage heaven, there are just too many subjects that the NYTimes doesn't cover well or covers in ways that perturb me (politics, industry, environment, technology).
I'd rather pay the money to Mother Jones, etc.. In fact, that should be your sales pitch, to us partisans. If you'd support the NYT for x dollars a month, why not help your friends at MotherJones, WashMonthly, etc.., for the same, or instead? Or, consider targeted giving -- I'd rather pay for investigative journalism targeted at things I care deeply about, rather than pay and hope that the NYT does the right thing.

Are you kidding me?

"I would never pay for news as long as there are hundreds and hundreds of free sources." There it is in a nutshell, the thought-free position...everything should just be free. Well, I say nothing is free; somebody is paying for the news you read, just not you, I guess. Way to suck value from the world. And newspapers should copy the Craigslist model? Craigslist is, in large part, what has killed newspapers by eliminating classified advertising revenue. And Craigslist is explicitly aiming to be non-profit. But then if you're getting all your information from Drudge, there's no reason why you'd be thinking about anything, anyway.

...

If they're going to charge, I don't want to be paying a large lump sum for a paper I might not come back to for months, and find my time is already up.

Also, they don't seem to have the right idea of what ads to suppress if you pay or how to get access to the ads after they've been shown: Haven't you ever wanted to go back to an ad you saw, only to not have its link there when you refresh the screen?

Maybe if national papers banded together and ran promotions to get people to pay to a central payment tool - which would then give monies back to the papers based upon which one got people to sign up.

Unfortunately, those who own

Unfortunately, those who own the gathering and disseminating of the 'news' want to earn more than just enough for eating and paying the rent. They are not satisfied with the median wage, but the market no longer values journalism's inputs as highly as it once did. If the NYT said they will stop taking corporate advertising and would return to investigative journalism of government and business, instead of being a propaganda arm of government and business, then perhaps that would be a business model subscribers would want to support. Subscribing to the NYT, as it stands now, would be subsidizing a pro Wall St and war slanted propaganda rag. If the NYT wants to increase its net profits, it should fire Brooks and its finance propagandists.

If the NYT discontinued its

If the NYT discontinued its advertising, then charging a subscription might make business sense. What the NYT should do is become an internet service provider if it wants to collect fees for internet usage.

I would never pay for news

I would never pay for news as long as there are hundreds and hundreds of free sources. Early Internet experience showed that for every site that wanted to charge for information, there were others that would put information out on the Internet for free. Seems a bit old hat subscribing to a few new sources when there are aggregators like drudgereport from which you can link to many sources and the most interesting stories from dozens and hundreds of sources.

I would say the newspapers have been rather unimaginative in financing their online editions. They could perhaps copy the Craigslist business model. The Chicago reader, an alternative newspaper with a fairly large circulation, used the same model -- free noncommercial ads, paid for commercial ads -- to print their paper for several decades, although they are now struggling.

It might be in the end that investigative journalism would have to be supported by a foundation model or something, but then does anyone care anymore? Political correctness has supplanted patriotism and integrity as our highest national value.

the problem seems to lie in

the problem seems to lie in that no one has come up with a convenient way to make micropayments. Once that is seamless, and transparent, so you don't have to make an effort for each payment, it may be more successful, and may point to how to capitalize the intertrons.

Interaction? By the people

Interaction? By the people who know what they are talking about? Hmm, I see a business model here that it appears there is a demand for.

Weird

So, you'd pay for the NYT if they got rid of all the columnists you disagree with? God forbid that such sensitive souls should have to put up with something so onerous. I can't believe people would not pay $5 a month for the NYT...why should it be free? Apparently because the idiots that set up early web "business" models were naive enough to believe their own nonsense, and we swallowed that nonsense because it was great to get for free what cost a lot to produce. Now everybody has this firmly held belief that everything on the web should be free. That's gonna change.

When the Times restricted

When the Times restricted access to the editorial page behind a firewall, I accessed the print version through a free database provided by my local library. It was a pain- you get an index list of article title, page, by-line, and no ability to scroll through the "front" page, but it was always available and always free.

internet access already costs money

Internet access already costs money. It will be difficult for the NY Times to grow subscribers when people are discontinuing their wide band and dial up services.

"The Times has them beat on

"The Times has them beat on a number of scores, but you still have to be a real news junkie before you're going to be unsatisfied with the flood of news from other outlets."

One important exception is what might broadly be called cultural news: arts, lifestyle features, ideas/letters, etc. Sometimes the Times falls into self-parody, but in general it's the only American paper that seriously competes on these beats. That's true whether one's reading in one's specialization (I can't imagine life with Dave Kehr), catching up with other arts (for me, the architectural reviews) or engaging in lifestyle voyeurism (the Dining section).

Another interesting point is that the bloggers seem to have missed this angle because they consume hard news far more than cultural news.

Times charging for what?

Yes, yes, I agree with all this. But then I think...Judith Miller. Wiliam Kristol. And suddenly I lose interest.

Newspapers shrinking

Satirist, comedian, and writer Harry Shearer pointed out in this morning's (7/12/09) "Le Show" broadcast (not heard in your area) that while American newspapers seem to be dying on the vine, British newspapers are thriving -- the Saturday and Sunday editions are all fat, bulging with extra sections and (it would seem) ad revenue.

One wonders what the Brits know that we don't.

Opinions Only

I don't know the solution to saving The Times or any other paper, in print or online. But one thing strikes me about the 30 comments so far: how many write off the major papers for their OpEd columnists. If columnists vanished, I do understand that the papers would be less entertaining and would sell less. If they vanished, I also understand that the world would carry on. I've no doubt that bloggers can bloviate as well, or at least agree with me as often. I can bloviate myself.

But the comments suggest that a lot of people have already lost track of the difference between that and news. I worry that this is the future. Papers won't in fact survive, we'll have an extremely partisan age, with opinions based on little but the public record. Partisanship itself isn't a bad thing. I wish we had a more partisan Democratic party. But what if right now we were all shouting that torture and surveillance were ordered from the highest places, while conservatives could as easily shout back, and no one could be proved wrong?

Sure, the papers have let us down on checking government (e.g., Judith Miller). But follow TPM's obsessive (and, to me, annoying) links from its headines, which always point to its own articles, as if it were doing the reporting. Then another click takes you to the real papers. They're the only ones doing the work. It also takes more than one for that to continue, since competition between them drives the scoop as much as an editor's sense of responsibility. In the long run, it is what gives us editors with a sense of responsibility.

"Information wants to be free" is nonsense on the face of it, as if information wanted anything, as if NY Times t-shirts (as one alternative revenue source) had any more claim to cost money, as if supply and demand went out the window, or as if it didn't cost money to have a paper online or off. Still, I suspect that none of these schemes will preserve a free press, and the future is with the commentators who think the Times is the sum of David Brooks and Maureen Dowd.