NYT to Start Charging for Some Web Content in September

Editor & Publisher reports The New York Times announced today that it will start charging for some online content, beginning in September.

Newspapers are concerned about their loss of circulation, and the NYT's solution is to commit suicide

The new, premium level of membership will be called TimesSelect, and participants will have exclusive access to Op-Ed and news columnists on NYTimes.com, easy and in-depth access to the paper's online archives, and early access to certain articles on the site, among other features. Home-delivery subscribers will automatically receive TimesSelect membership. For non-subscribers, it will cost $49.95. Most news, features, and multimedia on the Times site will remain free.

The NYT likes to think of itself as the "Paper of Record" and that its columnists have major influence. So what does it do. It charges a fee for access to its historical files ("Times Past") and it hides its political columnists behind a Pay Wall.

TimesSelect features will include:

• Exclusive access to columnists including David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Bob Herbert, Nicholas Kristof, Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, John Tierney, Dave Anderson, Peter Applebome, Harvey Araton, Dan Barry, Clyde Haberman, Gretchen Morgenson, Joe Nocera, Floyd Norris, Joyce Purnick, William Rhoden, Selena Roberts, George Vescey, Roger Cohen, and John Vinocur.
  

  Some of which are read and discussed in many blogs, but unless their columns are syndicated and appear in other free publications, will disappear, and other columnists will be what everyone blogs about

• TimesPast: Access to The Times's extensive archives.
  

  There goes the "Paper of Record" title.

• Exclusive multimedia offerings for TimesSelect subscribers including audio and photo essays, video, and podcasts.
  

  There goes any attempt to reach out to the future

• TimesFile: A new tool that helps readers tag and organize articles from The Times.
  

  A tool which will not be used much by people who get the paper home delivered, and few will pay $50 for it

• Ahead of The Times: Early access to articles that will appear in sections such as Real Estate, The New York Times Magazine, Travel, and Sunday Arts.
  

  Early access to worthless information

• TimesNewstracker: E-mail alerts to track important news topics. This service is currently sold separately but will be included as part of the TimesSelect benefits.

John Hawkins blogged This decision may lead to more short term dollars for the New York Times, but it's a mistake that will cost them money and influence in the long-term.

You are absolutely right.

The problem with this is that once you stick all the columnists behind a $49.95 subscription wall, the number of people reading those writers will drop like an anvil out of a helicopter. The reality is that there is so much free content out there -- and free content of high quality -- that most people just aren't going to pay for what they can get for free. Even if the Times does make money off of the deal, they'll probably end up trading 90% of their online audience to get 10% of their readers to fork over dough. That 90% will include journalists, bloggers, and countless other people who would otherwise have read and been influenced by those writers.

I cant see many people willing to pay that much money. I think they will just lose the exposure, and not get much for it. They may think people will stop blogging about them, but they are wrong, it is just that the bloggers will have to blog about second hand information, rather than being able to directly refer their readers to the source of the information, where they can read for themselves what the NYT said.

Columnists like David Brooks and John Tierney? I'm certainly not going to pay money to read them or link to them, since my readers aren't going to fork over $49.95 to see what they have say. But the people who'll really be hurt will be liberal columnists like Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, Frank Rich and Paul Krugman who all made the Favorite Columnists Of Left-Of-Center Bloggers. A year from now, assuming the New York Times goes through with it, none of them will make the list because most of their current readers will lose access to them rather than purchase a New York Times membership.

Absolutely true. The only way any of them will be discussed is if their columns are syndicated in other papers, and if those papers put the columns up on free websites.

Now, if your #1 selling feature for a membership (by far) is your popular columnists, then long-term, how are you going to continue to rake in the loot if you're killing off their fanbase by requiring a subscription to read them? If the goal here is make a one time killing at a price of severely cutting into the New York Times online audience while also markedly reducing the popularity of the Times columnists, this makes sense. Otherwise, somebody at the New York Times should think twice about whether this is a good idea or not.

Virginia Postrel blogged Despite all those emailed columns, it seems likely that the Times is underestimating online readers' elasticity of demand and is risking its status as the most-talked-about (and blogged-about) newspaper in the world. Besides, as various blog commenters have pointed out, (examples here and here), since the columns are syndicated you can find many of them on other newspapers' sites. Left out of the blog discussion is an important aspect of the new premium service: Home delivery subscribers like me get it free, and it includes access to the large NYT archives that now charge on a per-article basis. Also, the premium columns include not just those on the op-ed page but others elsewhere in the paper, including major business section columnists. I can't blame the Times for trying to sell more home-delivery subscriptions, which should boost ad revenue, or for trying to generate some revenue from its website. Maybe if they get this to work, they can give me a raise. But I'm not optimistic--about either the premium service or that raise.