The New York Times recently unveiled their plans to introduce a so-called "pay wall" that will allow readers to access up to 20 Times stories per month for free. After this, the reader either will have to pay for a subscription plan or wait until the next month to read certain Times stories. Other features, such as classified listings, Times blogs, browser and smartphone apps, and Top News stories aren't counted among the 20 story limit.
And so, we step further into the breach of paid online newspaper content. It's been a long time coming, serving as the single biggest question mark / looming dread for the future of journalism. It is not likely to be the end of printed news, at least not in our lifetimes, and certainly not for smaller papers. Up until now, the Internet has been a vast compendium of news content --- one could find just about any story from major outlets and a lot of content from more localized papers --- all for free! It was manna from heaven! As is happening a lot lately, the harsh reality has finally hit.
The time has been overdue for a mainstream paper to set the bar for paid e-news. I don't think we can wait much longer to meander on the way to where we need to get. One outfit has to serve as a beacon in the long-indecisive online pay format and establish if the industry can sink or swim. Cutting paper and ink costs reduce a budget drastically (as our "Intro to Journalism" professor said at the time, it cost the Times $9 for the paper used for the Sunday edition. That's before anything else happened --- just the bulk paper). Papers have to pay their bills, they have to pay their staff a living wage --- and, in many cases, need to re-invest in staff after 10 years of layoffs, flat hiring and cutbacks on quality --- it would be extra special if they could turn some profits again. A broad switch to e-papers has obvious environmental benefits as well. Less demand for paper equates to fewer trees and less paper waste in landfills, as one example. One can get very involved when thinking about what a digital future would look like.
One thing that bothers me is the price on that price wall. I don't have inner knowledge on how they set the prices for the various tiers, but they're higher than I would have imagined --- especially when factoring in the savings inherent in not buying physical products, operating and renting space for the press-works, not having delivery costs, etc. As the above link states, the Times' monthly packages range from $15 to $35 based on the platform used to access it. For myself, I would probably be choosing the $20 option that would seem to cover laptop or netbook access. As a close corollary, our Hartford Courant subscription is $1.75/week ($7/month if my math is correct), with a standard subscriber discount. Sure, when the discount runs out, we have to vaguely threaten to cancel the paper, and then the deal is continued fairly seamlessly. A dirty little secret is that a paper is much more interested in keeping its subscriber base to attract advertisers than it is in collecting the relative pittance of a subscription price. A canceled account would mean that the Courant would have to start sending us packets in the mail once a week --- at their cost --- to satisfy their direct-marketing agreements. So the question stands: since production costs are less, why isn't the e-paper cheaper than a real print paper? (On a side note, as a print subscriber of the Courant, we don't get e-paper access. What's up with that?)
Especially as an introductory price, this just isn't appealing. Especially something as tenuous as charging for something everyone's gotten for free for the past 10 to 15 years, this is the most important number that the Times needed to decide on. When I think of a pay wall my mind is flashing on the scene in "Stargate" when David Spader puts his hands into the gelatinous material as an experimentation. Wouldn't it have made more sense to let people dip a foot into the pay wall, rather than being forced to dive into it? Couldn't they at least start out with a deal for early adopters?
(Comic photo © Wiley Miller "Non Sequitur")
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