$50 to read the news. Let’s see…. The equivalent of my cable bill to read items I can get anywhere with a google search. nope. not worth it.
I don’t blame them. Ad revenue is plummeting, and journalists are being laid off en masse, and no one has any respect for what they do. You would never dream of going into a shop and demanding to wear a pair of pants for a while without paying, or demanding that an electrician fix your faulty wiring for free, but it’s fine to use someone’s written work, which they spent days, even weeks or months on, without paying? Information should perhaps be free, but gathering it, confirming it, synthesizing it and then organizing it in such a way that it’s understandable is hard work, and the person doing it should not be expected to work for free. Covering a beat effectively is hard work, and skilled work, and those who do it should be compensated. Sitting for five hours in a City Council meeting is not fun, putting together lists of street closures is not fun, covering crime, disasters and wars can be heart-wrenching and dangerous — remember Daniel Pearl? Furthermore, most people who say they don’t want to pay for content, saying that if newspapers go away we’ll still have the AP and other wire services have NO IDEA how much wires rely on newspaper content. Or that the AP, for example, makes most of its money by selling its services to newspapers. It’s a symbiotic relationship, and if newspapers die, the AP will likely die also, unless it completely changes its business model. And if the AP and newspapers die, tv and radio will also be injured, since they rely so heavily on newspapers and the wires for stories. Then what? Just the Internet? I guess anyone who can’t afford a computer and a web connection is screwed, huh? And yes, many journalists could be bloggers, but again, why should they work for free???
I’m kind of surprised at the reaction that seems to be the majority, all over the Web – similar to mo’s. I think the issue is that a lot of people are looking at the NYT in a vacuum, rather than the trendsetter that it is: if you think that many, many other news organizations won’t be following the NYT’s lead, you are going to be disappointed, and eventually, sources of quality, original reporting that you can access for free will simply dry up. I think eventually, you can expect to see many (if not most) news organizations that aren’t named BBC, CBC or (to a lesser extent) NPR charging for their online content.
Josh, it’s likely that even the government-subsidized media outlets will charge soon, because governments are going bankrupt, grants are drying up, and they can’t rely on ad revenue. Non-profits are really hurting right now. Besides, NPR, BBC etc. are also part of the news food chain, and as reliant on it as anyone else.
I see nothing wrong with paying for what we value. If we don’t, it simply won’t exist. Despite times I wrangle with it, I value the content of the NY Times, and I’ll be pleased to pay my fair share.
JetGirl – what do you mean that they’re “also part of the news food chain”? The way I see it in the case that I know best (the CBC), right now they have a few revenue streams that are maybe in flux due to the evolving business model behind network television (television ad revenues and perhaps broadcast rights fees paid by foreign broadcasters who use CBC content – though I don’t know how much that amounts to), and one, big stable source of income in the form of the $1 billion subsidy that the Canadian government provides it with each year. Assuming that subsidy holds up (ad revenues are a relatively small piece of the CBC’s income pie), why would they start charging for content (above what they already do in certain, specialized cases such as their specialty television channels)? I know less about the business models used by the BBC and NPR, but I do know that as long as people keep watching television in Britain, there will be license fees paid to the Beeb. It seems to me like public broadcasters are fairly insulated from the problems that are afflicting newspapers and commercial networks. Tell me where I’m wrong, though! And when you say “governments are going bankrupt” – which governments are you referring to? The Canadian government is digging itself a reasonably-sized deficit hole right now, but (and maybe this is pie-in-the-sky on my part) I honestly see no particular reason it won’t dig itself out of here within a decade or so, similar to what happened here in the mid-90s. There will be cuts, to be sure, but there are a whole host of political reasons that the CBC will continue to exist well into the future (with Quebec topping the list).
Josh, I’m thinking mainly of California when I talk about bankruptcy. It is one of the biggest economies in the world, and they’re in serious trouble. A lot of other economies (including in Asia) will suffer should California collapse. The Port of Long Beach, for example, is one of the biggest shipping portals on the West Coast. What would happen if it were shuttered? As for the news food chain, few news outlets are self-reliant. At the bottom, you have the smaller papers gathering news on the community level. They feed the bigger papers, which take a more regional view (and many bigger papers, such as the Los Angeles Times, own chains of smaller community papers, getting the local news that way) and usually don’t have the time or resources to do grassroots community reporting. The wire services, such as the AP, Reuters, UPI have agreements with papers big and small to share content. The papers pay for wire content outside their areas, and the wire services get news stories to syndicate. Though most wires have their own bureaus and news staff, they do not have the resources necessary to do it on their own. Back to the Los Angeles market, the AP has one small bureau covering 9 million people. There’s no way they can do the job without other papers in the area. The AP doesn’t work for free either, which is why there was a big kerfuffle over Yahoo printing AP stories without paying. That is all still being resolved. TV and radio, and Net News (think Yahoo) also rely heavily on the AP and other wires for content and news tips. Anyway, this is a novel, but my point is newspapers are the plankton of the news food chain. If they die, it will affect everything.
Ok – I agree that quality will be diminished at a lot of levels without newspapers (listen to a local morning newscast on CBC and tell me that most of their reporters aren’t following stories they found in that morning’s paper), I just don’t see how this results in public broadcasters going to some sort of model where they charge for content – which is what you said flat out was likely to happen in your second comment. It’s different in the US I know, with NPR’s federal subsidy representing a pretty miniscule portion of its budget, but in most places with strong public broadcasters, people already pay for the content through tax dollars.
True, this may not happen with the CBC, or the BBC. But both NPR and PBS are at risk. And frankly, as much as I like the idea of journalism being subsidized by the people via tax dollars, I worry about any news outlet largely dependent on government backing. There is enough concern about the media being in bed with government already.
I think this is okay. I listen to NPR for like, 60 hours a week, and I give them $10.50 a month. If I really read the NYT every day and valued it that much, I wouldn’t really have a problem with it, other than an initial dissapointment. I think it’s similar to music downloading. I still download stuff for free once in a while, but I have a paid Rhapsody account and sometimes buy songs on iTunes. I think that if they make the benefits great enough, eventually, no one will mind.
On second thought, though… if this does become accepted by most people, then it’s likely to catch on to other online news sources, which would make free and accessible information limited to people who can’t afford to subscribe to a paper. It’s so great that information is so readily accessible to virtually everyone now, and this could potentially limit information to the people who have the financial means to pay for it. I’m torn on this…
Well, Cacophonies, newspapers are still the cheapest news out there. By paying online, you can keep the 50 cent print product going…
You know what? If it keeps the Times in business, I’d be perfectly happy to pay the flat fee if it turns out I’m in the “heavy user” category. But that’s what I’m most concerned with: finding out how the meter system is really going to work, and how they’re actually going to change access to articles through search engines.
Given the downturn in newspaper subscriptions, I am surprised they’ve just recently decided to charge. I see other online newspaper outlets following suit.