One includes a "meter system," in which the reader can roam freely on the Web site until hitting a predetermined limit of word-count or pageviews, after which a meter will start running and the reader is charged for movement on the site thereafter. ...
Mr. Keller described the second proposal as a "membership" system. In this model, readers pledge money to the site and are invited into a "New York Times community." You write a check, you get a baseball cap or a T-shirt (if it's like Channel Thirteen, a tote bag!), an invite to a Times event, or perhaps, like The Economist, access to specialized content on the Web.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
A newspaper experiments
The New York Times is brainstorming ways to make more money online and stop the bleeding. Who knows if any of the ideas will work. But at least it's trying to come up with a solution, instead of allowing itself to slowly waste away.
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Sounds like the next couple of years are going to be interesting (in the shitty sense) for online news. I saw the other day that some of the folks over in the Curated Internet can't even be bothered to register for NYTimes.com. I suspect that the public at large (myself included, maybe) is settling for getting a certain amount of news per day, and not worrying overmuch about the source.
The membership system might work, but I'd be sad about the money it might take from Public Radio. I like tote bags, though. I just don't always remember to use them.
Thank you for linking to the Reddit comment page. I had no idea so many people think it's too much effort to log on to the New York Times to read an article. My god!
The NYT has its problems, but it also has some of the best reporting in the English language. I can't fathom walling myself off from that because it's too much of a pain to log on. People!
I fear this refusal to pay (and even log on) is going to drag down the quality and quantity of public information our society has, leaving voters poorly informed.
You can already see it in Honolulu -- the Star-Bulletin's successive layoffs have left it without reporters covering education and the environment. Their military writer has to spend a chunk of his time covering cops instead of the military. The paper just has less news in it, period.
Last month, neither Honolulu paper could spare the staff for a decent story on the issues in the special election held for the Windward seat on the Honolulu City Council.
It was very, very hard to find good information about the candidates and their policy positions in that race. I mainly saw lots of rumors flying around in e-mails.
Hopefully quality news from some new entity - or from a rejuvenated newspaper - will eventually replace the void... Right now though, I think the void is only growing.
(Apologies for the rant. I'm sure you all know the future of news is one of my personal obsessions.)
I wonder if that entity will be our Octopus brethren.
There has to be some minimum level of coverage that the news industry can't sink below. I wonder where that is.
Also, maybe the problem is one of scale differential between national, local, and very local news. It must be really expensive for large news organizations to cover beats of different sizes. I don't know. Work has me thinking about the level of complexity that an organization can effectively manage. I don't think it's very much! Adding managers offers increasingly diminishing returns.
Then again, I've only had one real job and I know quite a bit about the cave wall directly in front of my face. As the saying goes in some other language, probably.
The NYT just released a new photojournalism blog, lens!
Wow, now that is a gutsy interface, especially for the Times.
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