NYT Pay Wall, Part II

Further to my previous post about the New York Times "pay wall" comes this article by Joshua Benton. The Times' plan --- in Canada; it goes live in the U.S. next week --- was hacked by four lines of Javascript.

And, as Benton writes, it is undone by what he calls the "Frank Rich discount" where one subscribes to the print-version Sunday Times and gets the complete digital subscription for free. This is an idea I've had for quite a while about the future of newspapering. It doesn't look like I mentioned it before, but rest assured, it was an original idea in my thoughts. I've always noted that people in our modern age do spend time with the physical Sunday paper. They do crosswords, they clip the coupons, they read about politics to go along with the Sunday morning political talk shows, they look for used furniture or jobs in the classifieds (well... there's slim pickings now on the latter score). Coming up with a pricing option centered around the Sunday paper and digital access the rest of the week would seem to be the best of both worlds. As Benton points out: it saves subscribers money, it saves the newspapers money, it allows for people to still have access to a physical paper; it gives people enough useful old paper for its sundry household uses (you really won't know how useful cheap paper is until it's gone), without being so much to have to haul to the recycle depot. The only real downside to this would be the maintenance and usage problems for web presses --- I'm not sure that a once-a-week printing schedule would be profitable. Weeklies do this now, but they're usually printed on presses that run dailies, among other ephemera printing jobs.

I just wish the Hartford Courant would do something like this, but as I wrote previously, print subscribers don't get access to the e-paper, and the Courant's current pricing schemes actually make it cheaper to get the print version, which is very expensive to produce and distribute. I really believe that people are ready to go digital, if they were given more choices and realistic prices that don't force them to subsidize other parties.