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.

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.

July 4, 2009

Hey, look; the fake news page thing reaches its logical conclusion--an entire fake edition of the New York Times from the future, filled with a creepy level of optimism. I heard they passed out papers in NYC, too. Real papers, made of paper.