...except for the fact that for a non-New Yorker like me, the product that matters sucks:
Times Co. also asked whether subscribers would be willing to pay a discounted fee of $2.50 a month for access to the site, in the poll confirmed today by Catherine Mathis, a company spokeswoman. Nytimes.com, the most visited among newspapers’ sites, is currently free.
Times Co. is contemplating additional sources of revenue as marketers slow spending on the Internet. Ad sales at the publisher’s sites, also including about.com and boston.com, fell 8 percent and 3.5 percent in the first quarter and fourth quarter of 2008 respectively. They gained 6.5 percent last year.
The New York Times could be the standard for excellence and objectivity in reporting, particularly on national news and international news that concerns America. Unfortunately, they are neither excellent nor objective in those areas. Sure, sometimes they pop out some good stories and not all of the reporters there are complete hacks. Overall though, and over time, reading the Times will leave a person dumber than when he started.
The problem is not that what they print is factually incorrect, usually, but in the natural filtering that news organizations do for their readers. I expect a newspaper to filter the news they present and to provide a reasonably complete synopsis of events. That is the value that they can provide to readers these days. I don't want to read thirty pages of transcript or watch thirty minutes of video to see what some politician or general said. The problem with the Times and news organizations in general, is that they have moved far away from objectivity in performing that service and have shot their credibility, at least with me. I've seen way too many times over the last few years, as the internet has allowed more and more access to source documents that I can read for myself, that the Times and others have been at best inaccurate and at worst dishonest in their coverage.
There are lots of factors hitting newspapers in the pocketbook these days. For me the issue is quality. I won't be subscribing to the Times online unless they actually deliver the product that they advertise, and then I think I would. I'd pay $5 or maybe even $10 per month for a quality news service online. Too bad the Times isn't one.
It will be interesting to see how the MSM survives. No one on the internet wants to pay for anything, but somehow a way is going to have to be figured out for content to be provided. It wouldn't surprise me if we go to a state-subsidized media, like the BBC.
Posted by: Mr. Bingley | July 10, 2009 at 05:26 AM
The New York Times, The Washington Post, and maybe The Wall Street Journal will be the last survivors. Print media is on a rapidly accelerating march to extinction. They have a chance online if they can find or create content that people want and can't get somewhere else for free but then they've still got the problem of piracy that the music and film industries have. The WSJ has a subscription model in place but you can find their articles in their entirety published elsewhere without too much trouble. They're all in a tough spot.
Posted by: Rob | July 10, 2009 at 06:11 AM
Mr. B.-Well, I would pay a moderate amount for a news portal that I could trust. As Rob points out below, I'm not sure if that would work in practice. And don't we already have a BBC-lite in PBS?
Rob-Yeah, that's a significant issue also because so much of that content is distributed through wire services to other outlets.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I would pay for quality. I'm a bit of a geek, but I'm not so much of one that I actually like to go to sigir.mil and read some 100 page report because I can't count on WaPo or NYT to accurately summarize it.
Posted by: Dave E. | July 10, 2009 at 07:57 AM