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Boycotting TimesSelect
When the New York Times announced in May that it planned to put its op-ed columnists behind a pay firewall starting in September, I told the head of the paper's online operation why it was a mistake.
Well, they began doing it on Monday. Here's the newsfromme blog on the move: "I've gone ahead and subscribed to TimesSelect...or at least, I'm on their 2-week free trial, which will roll over to an annual subscription if I don't cancel in twelve days. A lot of people, I'm guessing, will opt out then and the Times will have a better idea of how successful this new idea will be. I'm not sure yet if I'll be among those sticking around."
I've decided not to subscribe to TimesSelect as a way to protest the Times' misguided decision. Yes, they may get 50,000 or 100,000 people around the globe to subscribe (at 50 bucks a year), but that is offset by their opinion writers' incalculable loss of influence on the Web and in the blogosphere.
A second reason not to subscribe is to prevent the Op-Ed Firewall Follies from spreading like a cancer to other news publications.
This experiment will fail inside of 12 months.
Meantime I would like to link to the following column -- and dozens of future columns -- in the Times. But starting today I will no longer do so, since I'm not a part of the Times' marketing machine.
David Brooks in the NY Times: The contrast between the speeches that John Kerry and John Edwards gave this week is characteristic of the argument that now divides the Democratic Party.To continue reading this article, you must be a subscriber to TimesSelect.
September 21, 2005 at 11:08 PM in Media | Permalink
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New Media Musings: Boycotting TimesSelect
Talk about serendipity! I became a fan of Maureen Dowd through my (free) subscription to the email version of the New York Times. I really like reading the Times and had it safely tucked into the bucket I cons... [Read More]
Tracked on Oct 6, 2005 7:51:06 AM
» New Media Musings: Boycotting TimesSelect from Daily Patch
New Media Musings: Boycotting TimesSelect
Talk about serendipity! I became a fan of Maureen Dowd through my (free) subscription to the email version of the New York Times. I really like reading the Times and had it safely tucked into the bucket I cons... [Read More]
Tracked on Oct 6, 2005 7:53:01 AM
Comments
Certainly boycotting TimesSelect is your right, J.D., and a perfectly valid response for anyone. I choose to subscribe, for a couple of reasons that I'll enumerate:
1. I read the Times online daily and once or more a year or so I subscribe to the dead-tree edition for a dozen weeks. But increasingly the dead-tree option isn't a solution. I don't think it's realistic to expect to receive for free ad infinitum an important, expensive-to-produce news product. If I get to read the whole damn Times for just $50/yr. that's a good deal, imo, even if I can read 90 percent of it for $0/yr.
2. There's at least one hidden benefit: currently most Times articles disappear behind the paywall after a week. With TimesSelect I can pull up 100 of these for free every month, articles anywhere in the archive. That's a good deal. (Yes, I can pull those same articles up for nothing from my college library database, but it's a bit time-consuming and awkward.) Now if I click on an archived article I just get a "wanna download it?" button and there it is. That's worth something to me.
3. There are some hints in TimesSelect that other goodies are forthcoming for subscribers only.
4. I don't believe any serious blogger who writes extensively about politics/public affairs will be deterred from continuing to read Times opinion stuff. There are workarounds for those who don't wish to subscribe. But to simply not read Times opinion writers isn't really viable for a serious public affairs commentator, imo.
Posted by: Roger Karraker at Sep 22, 2005 11:14:07 AM
you can count me in also as another person who has also decided not to subscribe to TimesSelect as a way to protest the Times' misguided decision.
it's really sad that the newspaper business is following the music business Right Over The Cliff in doing precisely The Wrong Things inorder to reinvent themselves in The New Reality.
Posted by: Geoff Goodfellow at Sep 22, 2005 11:35:24 AM
Remember, these are opinion columnists who write for -- and receive their paychecks from -- the print publication, not the Times' online division. In most cases, they're not writing a single extra word for the Web.
Why should online readers subsidize the print edition?
I think a *lot* of bloggers (outside the Josh Marshall/OpinionJournal/Chris Nolan sphere) will stop linking to Times op-ed columnists starting this week.
Posted by: JD at Sep 22, 2005 1:08:57 PM
Virtually all the writers going under the Times Select banner will be producing extra material for the online edition.
It's a false dichotomy anyway, though. Times writers are paid for what they write, not for what sees print in ink. It doesn't matter if the content in just for the Times print edition (there are still Times articles that never appear online), for print and syndication, for print and online, or whatever. If Times writers don't get paid for the print edition, they won't write articles and the online edition will be empty. That's why it's a joke to say that the Times online division is making money. It is, technically, but only because it doesn't have to pay for most of its content. So asking online readers to pay is far from asking online readers to subsidize print readers. The reality is that currently print readers greatly subsidize online readers.
Now, that doesn't mean I agree what the Times is doing with TimesSelect is a good idea. The editorials and columns are the things I care about the least. I do not generally look at any of the Times editorials or opeds. And I get Times Select for free anyway, because there's a subscription in my name. Personally, I'm skeptical about asking online readers to pay for opinions, which are less than a dime a dozen online. The Times' strongest attribute is its in-depth reporting, which remains free.
But the Times is doing something that's necessary; they're trying to figure out what their business model will look like in the long run. Print cannot continue to subsidize online till the end of time. Virtually every newspaper without a pay wall on the web faces that dilemma. While advertising revenue online is up substantially from where it was a few years ago, it still doesn't come close to what is needed to support a newspaper. So while I don't think anybody should subscribe to Times Select unless they find it worth their $50, I think not subscribing as "a protest" despite thinking that the subscription is worth $50 is incredibly wrongheaded. The message that the Times will receive from that is not a message you want to send.
Posted by: Greg Andrew at Sep 22, 2005 5:03:06 PM
Business model, schmiznez foddel. As long as the vast majority of text-based web content remains free, there is *no way* to make opinion journalism profitable on the web, period. Why read Dowd when there's Huffington?
What we have is an encrusted aura of status around these columnists that will quickly dissipate along with their readership. Read Nisenholz: The idea is only to capture a small share of their million-or-so online readership. Sure, they're'll be a little sewing circle of people who want to read books with John Tierney, or take economics lessons from Paul Krugman. That's all they need to turn a buck -- and the sound of that ringing till will be a death knell.
The vast majority of blogs will be forced to de-link. Already Krugman's archive site is down.
The grotesquerie of ratifying the elitism we all know about the Times and its readership will have an incalculable effect on the way they're viewed in the wider discourse. "Here's what the TimesSelect people have to say ... " Times Select -- a bunch of mostly liberal elitists who have to spend 50 bucks a year in order to be told what to think.
I told Maureen Dowd in email that she was being pimped out -- and she *agreed* with me. The columnists can't like this one little bit. They're having their reputations sold, diminishing their readership to create an artifical market.
The fair thing to do would be to make the whole paper subscription-only, or to raise newsstand, subscription and/or advertising prices. The whole paper might suffer -- but at least it would suffer equally. Instead, the columnists are being made to take the hit for the news department. Thus the Paper of Record can maintain its hegemonic reach with a (mostly) free-access website.
I appreciate these columnists. I think what's being done to them is abominable.
I'm so angry I won't even buy the dead-tree edition anymore.
Call it spite? A meaningless protest? Sure -- whatever you'd like.
If the New York Times wants to face into the winds of the future -- then this is the part of the future they must face: A readership so vastly more correct-thinking and well-informed than the rest of us that it floats off into political irrelevancy.
Bob
Posted by: Bob McKeown at Sep 30, 2005 2:10:58 AM
We can quickly guage how the experiment is going down by looking at the Times'own most emailed articles. Before the experiment started, Maureen and Paul and the other writers now firewalled were a constant presence on this list. I am yet to find a piece by any of the firewalled writers show up on the list after the firewalling began. I can't imagine that this enhances the reputation and clot of their ace writers. Do the math, the Times is sacrificing its future for a temporary gain. Somebody should start thinking right at the Times.
Posted by: Matt at Oct 5, 2005 10:04:39 AM
