stories about: "ny times"
Does The NY Times Donate To Wikipedia For Being A Massive Source Of Information?
from the questions,-questions dept
Glyn Moody points us to an interesting analysis, by David Gerard, of yet another problem with the NY Times' moronic paywall: that it means the NY Times will be cited a lot less on Wikipedia, thereby handing over the "first draft of history" to other publications like The Guardian and the BBC.But the even more interesting point comes after that:
Every journalist I've spoken to since 2006 uses Wikipedia as their handy universal backgrounder. Funnily enough, there's a distinct lack of donations to the Wikimedia Foundation from newspapers and media organisations. How much did the New York Times donate in the fundraiser?Marcus Carab, who works in a newsroom, made a similar point in response to that article a few weeks ago when the NYTime's Bill Keller claimed that the Huffington Post was a "pirate site," in that newspaper reporters rely on tons of other sources that never get any credit, let alone payment (excuse Marcus' Canadianisms, he can't help it):
We do this stuff for everyone to use and reuse. Journalists taking full advantage of this is absolutely fine. But claiming we should then pay the papers for the privilege is just a little odious.
Forget the fact that pavement-pounding reporting is a form of aggregation from the public - newspapers actively aggregate from tonnes of published sources too. Every newsroom has a table covered in copies of every other newspaper in town - in case you missed something, or they got an angle you didn't, or you think one of the stories can be taken further. In addition to reporting, all journalists do research: they look up other articles on the topic, find past magazine interviews and pull data from published reports. Many science articles in newspapers are just summaries of journal articles.So this raises a really good point about the silly claims from the NY Times and others about how they need to get paid, since they believe that they're the "originators" of the news. I do wonder how many of the people at the NY Times did contribute to Wikipedia? I would bet many of the folks who insist that their own work needs to be paid for by users, have in turn never once contributed to Wikipedia.
And that's just what went on and still goes on in the traditional media ecosystem, amongst the old players. Newspapers actively aggregate from blogs too. Every journalist in entertainment or technology starts his morning looking for leads on blogs, and the first thing any reporter does when they get an assignment on a topic they aren't familiar with is look it up on Wikipedia.
Information comes in all sorts of forms from all sorts of places. The NY Times is good at what it does. No one is denying that. But it's delusional in its thinking that it somehow is the piece of the puzzle that is worth the most here.
Filed Under: donations, journalism, paywall, sources
Companies: ny times, wikipedia
Why The NY Times Paywall Business Model Is Doomed to Fail (Numbers)
from the dude-where's-my-math dept
Not considering technical details (every wall can be brought down), even by its own business model the New York Times' paywall is doomed to fail.
Last Friday's Financial Times had some interesting numbers.
- Fact 1: According to analysts, the New York Times only needs to convert 1 to 10 per cent of the online visitors in order for the model to pay off.
- Fact 2: NY Times chief executive Janet Robinson has stated that they only expect about 15 per cent of visitors to encounter the paywall, since visitors can read 20 articles per month for free.
- Fact 3: Full website access and the mobile app are bundled for $15 per month. For the iPad app + web you pay $20 per month. $35 for all three.
- Fact 4: One analyst argues that the NY Times could earn $66m per year if it converted just 1 per cent of the visitors. This would mean they go from paying nothing, to paying (at least) $195 a year.
There is no way these numbers add up. Consider fact 1 and fact 2. First of all only 1 per cent might actually not be all that easy, let alone 10 per cent. Secondly, the 1 per cent is misleading, as they'll actually have to convert 1 to 10 out of every 15 visitors to encounter the paywall. So they actually have to convert 6 to 66 (!) per cent.
Next, the pricing might be too high. $15 per month is a lot for consumers who are not used to pay for news online, especially since there's no additional value as Mike commented last week. I'm not saying nobody will pay, but dragging in the 6 to 66 per cent of the visitors will be challenging, to say the least.
I cannot imagine this paywall to be successful. They can probably kiss the $40m investment in the development goodbye.
Filed Under: math, paywalls, predictions, subscriptions
Companies: ny times
NYTimes Columnists Telling Readers How To Get Around The Paywall
from the they-don't-want-to-be-hidden dept
As we learned the last time the NY Times blocked its esteemed columnists off behind a paywall, those columnists really don't like being cut out of the conversation. So it's somewhat amusing, in the wake of the new paywall announcement, that star columnist Paul Krugman is already telling readers how to get around the paywall. Since it will be free to visit stories if you come in from elsewhere, Krugman is telling people an easy way to do so:But for those who haven't [subscribed], arriving at this blog via links won't count against your ration of free nytimes.com views. As I understand it, for example, you can come in via my automated Twitter feed; and of course clicking on links at Mark Thoma or other blogs will also work.Of course, in thinking about this, you have to wonder if there are going to be additional unintended consequences for the Times. For example, its home page is going to lose a lot of value, because each click now has a significant "cost." However, if you were to browse another site... say, one some third party set up that linked to the Times' articles, you could click those links without that cost. Your basic economics has to say that this harms the Times' own site while opening up opportunities for third parties to collect that traffic. It would be interesting if a Nobel Prize winning economist... such as Paul Krugman... decided to make that point to the geniuses in upper management at the NY Times.
Filed Under: paul krugman, paywall
Companies: ny times
Who Actually Felt 'Guilty' That They Read The NYTimes Online For Free?
from the living-in-delusion-land dept
The latest news on the NY Times' bizarrely uncompelling paywall experiment is that the people at the NY Times appear to be delusional about it. Peter Kafka has an interview with NYT digital boss Martin Niesenholtz in which he defends the paywall with some strange reasoning... including claiming that people feel guilty reading the NY Times for free:I think the majority of people are honest and care about great journalism and the New York Times. When you look at the research that we've done, tons of people actually say, "Jeez, we've felt sort of guilty getting this for free all these years. We actually want to step up and pay, because we know we're supporting a valuable institution."A few thoughts on this: first, it's a load of crap. I can't see that passing the laugh test. If they have research that says that, I'm willing to bet the research methodology was done poorly. At best, perhaps they asked the question in a way that made people embarrassed so they felt compelled to answer that way. News is free online. I've never heard anyone feeling "guilty" about not paying for news that was offered up for free on purpose. I mean, it makes you wonder, does anyone feel guilty for paying the subscription fees for a paper copy of the NY Times? After all, the subscription price doesn't even cover the printing and distribution costs, so if people feel guilty for not paying for the reporting, then they ought to feel guilty for paying the paper subscription price. But that's crazy.
More importantly, though, if they really believed that people felt guilty about it, they would just offer them up a way to pay what they wanted, voluntarily. Setting up a paywall with specific (and, at times, nonsensical) rules makes very little sense if you believe the key reason why people will pay is guilt. If the reason to pay is guilt, then just make it easy for people to do a pay what you want offering. But the Times didn't do that because they know, deep down inside, that very few people "feel guilty" for reading the NY Times without paying for it. Thus, they know that just asking people to pay won't work.
So why not just be upfront about why they're putting up the paywall? My guess is that the folks putting this together know deep down inside that this is a disaster in the making. It's why there's no value proposition being added here. All you get is a negative value proposition ("we won't block you at some point"). I doubt that the paywall will be a "disaster," just because the NYT's has a big enough core and loyal audience to get some to pay. I just can't figure out any way that it'll actually serve to really make the company that much money.
Filed Under: buisness models, martin niesenholtz, ny times, paywall
Companies: ny times
An Open Letter From A Canadian To The New York Times, Eh?
from the happy-to-help dept
Dear New York Times,
As a Canadian, I am writing to say what an honour and a privilege it is to be chosen as one of your preliminary test subjects for the dumbest business model imaginable. We don't get many chances to contribute up here in the untamed north, so the knowledge that we are helping to ensure "as smooth a transition as possible" for your real readers makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like a Tim Horton's hot chocolate.
Your plan makes perfect sense. The average Canadian starts his day chopping down trees and ends it with igloo sex (which is awesome, by the way) so we don't need something to be "smooth" and "fine-tuned" unless it's an axe or a Chippewa concubine. So by all means use us as your whetstone before you go hacking away at the American market - we don't mind in the slightest. New York is still basically a mythical place to us, so every article you publish is like a dispatch from Oz, and who wouldn't want to pay for that?
Now, there are those who will tell you that your business model couldn't be more doomed if you opened a chain of in-temple money changers, which is no doubt why you wanted to try it out on Canadians before attempting any human testing. I for one pledge to live up to the faith you have shown in us: I will ignore the nay-sayers and become a lifelong subscriber, if only to prove how much more agreeable we northerners are than whiny yanks like Felix Salmon. Felix thinks you can evaluate things with math. If Canadians believed that, we'd move our currency off the Syrup Standard. However, as your goal is to improve the product, I will dutifully point out that even to us your pricing structure makes less sense than your country's bacon naming conventions.
So thank you New York Times for singling Canada out as the only place on the entire planet that deserves to test your unfinished product. Of course, it's not entirely clear why it's still unfinished, since the $40-million you spent developing it is more than the combined wealth of our entire nation ever since Celine Dion moved to Vegas, but we have faith nonetheless. I sincerely hope that, with our help, your paywall will be a big hit in the real world.
Your faithful guinea-pig,
Marcus Carab
It Took The NY Times 14 Months And $40 Million Dollars To Build The World's Stupidest Paywall?
from the maybe-we-can-confuse-people-into-giving-us-money dept
We've been waiting patiently for almost 14 months since the NY Times announced that it was going to take another crack at a paywall -- something that it had massively failed at last time around. You would figure that given that amount of time, maybe they'd actually get something right. Instead, it looks like they may have gotten almost everything wrong. I'd point you to the NY Times' own explanation of the amazingly complex paywall, but I don't want to use up your limited number of "free page" views, so instead, I'll point you to everyone else's, often much more intelligent, analysis of the paywall, starting with Felix Salmon, who works through the details and can't make any sense of it.For starters, the plan is confusing. You get 20 page views for free. You can also get around the paywall five times per day if you come via a search engine. Or are reading one of their blogs. Or come via a link from another site, which might mean I can link to NYT stories, but why risk it? Top news is sorta free and certain stories might be free. Maybe. Then, if you're a paper subscriber you get the website for free. Okay, so what's the paywall. For $15 for every four weeks (not every month), you get access to everything on a laptop/desktop or a smartphone. But not an iPad (um, unless you use a browser, I guess). For $5 more you lose the smartphone access, but gain iPad/tablet access. Huh? Exactly. For $35 every four weeks you can get the NY Times on both a smartphone and the iPad. Oh, and if you pay, you still see all the ads. And, finally, this is the introductory pricing. Who the hell knows what the final pricing is. So sign up and expect to have to pay more later. Isn't that appealing?
They spent 14 months and over $40 million on this?!?
It feels like something that was completely developed by committee group-think. It's one of those things where they're sitting around and someone timidly suggests a dumb idea ("I know, for $5 more we take away their smartphone access") and, because they have to come up with something, someone else says "sure" and then they think there's validation of a good idea. But there's no one brave enough in the room to say: "Guys, the newspaper is digital. Charging different amounts based on the hardware is like charging people different prices for listening to the same music on headphones vs. speakers." But no one did that. And because they had a committee, who kept making bad suggestions like this, and 14-months to keep upping the stupid, they spent over $40 million on it.
And here it is. Well, if you're in Canada, that is. Why? Who knows? The NY Times apparently decided to see if they could set off the mocking bomb in a remote area by launching in Canada first, where perhaps they hoped people would be too polite to say "this is dumber than putting gravy on french fries." If you're in the US, you have a few more weeks to get your life in order and to stop reading the NY Times.
Digging into the economics, I'm having trouble seeing how this helps at all. Obviously, some people will pay. But it's not going to be nearly enough to overcome the costs of this program and the likely massive cost in customer service to deal with putting forth the most confusing paywall possible. On top of that, it will decrease people going to the actual website, meaning fewer ad impressions, meaning that they're killing off ad revenue at a time when ad revenue has been going up significantly. Last time the NY Times did a paywall (for just its columnists), many of the columnists got annoyed that their work was hidden away, which made them significantly less relevant. In the last few months I've spoken to a bunch of journalists at newspapers who are considering paywalls, and all those journalists seem to be considering finding a non-clueless publication to work for.
Oh, and missing from all of this? Any attempt to add value. There's nothing new of value to pay for. Just a paywall. Which takes away value.
Perhaps I'll be proven wrong, but I can't see how something like this succeeds. It's like a giant experiment in wrongness. It gets the user motivation wrong. It gets the economic model wrong. It gets the pricing wrong. It gets the value proposition wrong. It's the perfect combination of wrongness, which they now want you to pay for. I think I'll pass.
Filed Under: business models, journalism, paywalls
Companies: ny times
NYTimes: When We Do It, It's Journalism, When HuffPo Does It, It's 'Piracy'
from the um,-ok dept
We regularly see established newspaper journalists look down on the world of sites that add value to news by assuming that aggregating, commenting on and providing context for news first reported by others is somehow a "lesser" product. Of course, what they're doing in some sense is overinflating their own role in the media ecosystem. After all, they don't make the news (usually). They're really adding value to the actual events by reporting on it. The others are then adding additional value to the reporting. It's all part of the ecosystem.The latest sad example of this overvaluing of one's own work and talking down about someone else's work comes from the NY Times' Executive Editor Bill Keller (also a driving force behind the NYT's plan for a paywall). In a weird and somewhat rambling discussion, which eventually gets around to the future of news, Keller decides to attack the Huffington Post as a bunch of sniveling copyists, compared to his high minded version of journalism:
"Aggregation" can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe. It kind of describes what I do as an editor. But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.But wait. Aggregation is exactly the work that Keller does as an editor. And his sneering complaints about "taking words" from other people, packaging them on your own website and harvesting the revenue describes the NY Times too. After all, the news was actually initiated by the people his reporters are covering. They're the ones who provide the actual story and the quotes and information needed. Does the NY Times direct any of its revenue to the real originators of the material? The people the news actually happened to and the sources of their stories? Of course not. The very thought would certainly horrify Keller. "Real" news organizations like the NY Times never pay sources. It goes against their very moral core.
But there's massive cognitive dissonance at work here. Keller and the NY Times are aggregators. They're aggregating stories that happen to other people. They then add value (often tremendous value) to it in how they report on it. But other forms of aggregators also add value by doing more with those stories: adding commentary, details, criticism, promotion and many other things. The problem is that Keller, in a fit of pure ego, seems to think the chain of news stops with the reporter, rather than the sources and the actual newsmakers. As Mathew Ingram notes, Keller appears to be saying: "when we do it, it's journalism; when the Huffington Post does it, it's piracy."
Keller, of course, is also being incredibly misleading, if not downright dishonest, in how he portrays the Huffington Post. The site certainly does plenty of aggregating of content from other sites. Though, I will say as the recipient of just a few experiences where HuffPo has chosen to "aggregate" content from Techdirt, that it is an amazing driver of traffic. Frankly, I wish HuffPo would "aggregate" more of our stories because it is the single biggest driver of traffic we've ever seen. It beats every other big driver of traffic by many multiples.
But, more importantly, Keller is being misleading in pretending that HuffPo has always just been focused on reposting content from elsewhere. From its very beginnings, it has always produced tons of new content. Some of it may be more high quality than others, but the site has always produced unique content, which Keller pretends is some "recent" change in how HuffPo does business.
Filed Under: aggregation, bill keller, journalism
Companies: huffington post, ny times
NY Times Lawyers Shut Down Blog Promoting The NY Times
from the how-backwards-can-you-be? dept
The NY Times continues its drive to irrelevance. As we get ready to hear the details of the NYT's plan to lock itself up online, its lawyers are apparently seeking to shut down people promoting its works. Jonathan Paul, a former web editor at the NY Times, set up a Tumblr blog account last summer, which he used to promote what he felt was "beautiful and unexpected imagery" found on the NY Times website. He did so very much in the spirit of promoting those works, including full credits and links back to the original works at the NY Times. It built up a decent audience of people, driving many of them to the NY Times website. And, in response, the NY Times sent its lawyers to shut down the blog, claiming that it was copyright infringement (found via Mathew Ingram). Paul notes that the blog actually had a decent following within the NYT, and his former colleagues had encouraged the project and helped promote it as well, fully realizing that it was helping their own work get more attention and driving more traffic to the NYT. And then the lawyers stepped in. One more example of why just because you can do something from a legal standpoint, it doesn't mean you should -- and another reason why you tend to make really bad business decisions when you let the lawyers decide to act, without understanding the actual business implications of what you're doing.Filed Under: blogs, copyright, images, promotion
Companies: ny times
How Cute: NY Times, WaPo & Gannett Build Their Own Walled Garden Most People Will Ignore
from the tend-away dept
This is just a bit bizarre. As the NY Times and others keep moving towards a paywall, it and the Washington Post and Gannett have apparently funded a bizarrely pointless operation called OnGo, which appears to be an excessively limited, high priced, walled garden aggregator. For a mere $7 per month, you can get access to content from those three companies along with a few other big newspapers. Of course, there are limits. You only get the top 20 stories from the NY Times, for example.Or, you know, you could just use an RSS reader. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. And not pay the monthly fee.
I'm reading through the various details and stories on this project, and the one question I keep asking which isn't answered anywhere is what is the additional value this brings to the table. When the very best that the operation's boss man can do to explain his value proposition is to say "this is another option," you're in trouble. This isn't providing any more value for the (much higher) price. It seems to be targeted at fools, which is no way to build a business these days.
Filed Under: journalism, news, walled gardens
Companies: gannett, ny times, washington post
