The Gray Lady
I’m reading this story about the New York Times possibly charging for online access to their newspaper in the future and I’m nodding my head. This is what I’ve been saying for years. There’s a difference between traffic and profit, and when it comes to business the latter makes a much better scoreboard than the former.
Already I’m seeing comments pop up that “this will be the death of the Times”. No, it won’t. Not doing this will, their results over the last couple years have essentially proven that. Selling content online may not save them either, but it may, and if it doesn’t it won’t be what killed them.
The problem in many people’s thinking is the belief that there’s always a magic business model lurking around the corner that will circumvent the normal laws of capitalism just because the internet’s involved. There isn’t. Reducing marginal costs certainly opens up a few doors to businesses, but it doesn’t mean that any product can suddenly be profitably supported by advertising alone.
“Let’s find a way to do Class A journalism on such a low budget that we can profit off of advertising” might just be equivalent to “Let’s find a way to have an online shoe store where we give the shoes away and make money off of advertising.” It may not be possible, and a lot of the people I know in the tech world really need to open their minds to that. I’m not saying I’m certain for news in particular, though the evidence is certainly pointing in that direction, but there’s some chance that the expense of providing high quality journalism (for which there is always high demand) or video or social networking or whatever else is simply greater than the reward for any business model other than charging customers directly.
And if I’m right and it’s not possible, then what’s going to happen is one by one every free content site that tries to go the quality route (rather than the blog-style breaking news with little or no real insight one) is going to shut down. NYT realizes this, and that their quality comes with a price tag that ensures they’d be among the first. So they’re trying something different.
I pray for us that it works.
February 9, 2009 at 9:35 pm
But the Times has been doing a lot of Class B Journalism on a big budget. (Judy Miller, Maureen Dowd, William Kristol, et. al.) I'm not interested in paying for that horse manure.
They tried to charge for their editorial section. I wanted to read Paul Krugman for years but you had to pay for the whole section. It wasn't worth paying for just to read Paul Krugman.
I'll get my news from somewhere else – TPM, Firedog Lake, Daily KOS which are good quality sites that don't appear to be in danger of going out of business.
February 10, 2009 at 4:30 pm
You think TPM and Daily Kos are good, but not NYT? Wow, is about all I can say. That's mediocre editorial for ideologues, and I say that as someone generally on the same end of the political spectrum. They're the left's slightly more intelligent answer to Limbaugh and nothing more.
If you have a problem with the NYT's editorial, I guess it's impossible to argue that point, since an opinion can't be wrong, much less an opinion about opinions. But that's one small facet of what they do, and not the part that isn't fungible.
And Krugman is well-worth paying for when he's writing longer-form about economics. I agree with you when he veers though. I ended up unsubscribing from his blog there very quickly.