Comments on: The NYT paywall goes live

By: jimstoic

jimstoic — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 17:38:12 +0000

I agree with Dave1968: I don’t mind paying, but $15/month is too much. They are offering a half-off-for-six-months deal now, at least to some people, and at $7.50/month it seems priced just right. I don’t know that they’d get twice as many paying customers if they cut the price in half, but they’d have a lot more happy customers.

That said, I have no problem paying for some journalism. Aside from contributing to NPR, I don’t pay for any other journalism right now.

By: Dave1968

Dave1968 — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:46:00 +0000

I don’t have cable anymore so internet /netflix/’utube is my main entertainment reuters and NYT for news I’d be willing to pay because NYT is quality but $3.75 a week is to much maybe 99cents or $1.50 it would have to be cheap, its not like your buying a whole paper.

By: bullspin

bullspin — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 02:59:05 +0000

“Analog” newspapers and traditional news-gathering organizations are undergoinging debilitating change. In one way or another, responsible, objective journalism has to have financial support. Right now, however, I object to the cost of access to the NY Times on-line–I’ll try to see what life is like without it. Mr. Sulzberger has set his price too high.

All kinds of commercial interests are trying to make a cash cow of the internet–metering broadband use, nickel-and-diming the public for both access and content. The finagling Comcast is doing with Netflix is a great example. I believe in net neutrality, with low-cost, democratized access. The internet is, after all, a public amenity–something so-called free enterprise did not create. The public should not allow it to go the way healthcare and other essential services have gone–there ought to be a universality of access with content providers drawing from a huge pool of subscribers, with subscriptions that are fairly priced. Same thing can be said, of course, with health care reform. But the American corporate mentality, coupled with its devious manipulation of Congress, will not permit this, if ever, without a good deal of political drama.

By: Mizzle

Mizzle — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 02:05:57 +0000

Goodbye NYT.
Nobody is going to pay for something that they can get free elsewhere.
What I think is hilarious is this: Are they going to track your count with cookies, or with a giant database. If it’s the latter, then they will be chewing through server power like no tomorrow, access a database every time someone views a new article (or at least every time they start a new web session).
Also, the limited advertising revenue you once had will now plummet. Your page views are easily monitored by 3rd party stat sites, and no companies will pay a premium for sub-par hit sites.

By: Saint999

Saint999 — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 20:23:27 +0000

I’m retired and post a lot of comments on NYT columns. It costs $195 for a digital subscription. Why not use the occasion to reduce internet time? Shortly after posting that reaction I got an email offering the rest of 2011 free, courtesy of Lincoln. Say what? How funny if the maker of the Lincoln Town Car funded anti-corporatist comments by the owner of a cheap old car. But accepting a favor from Lincoln seemed creepy, so I let it go. Now here I am finding many different news sources. I probably won’t miss the NY Times that much. I’m shocked.

By: ahniwa

ahniwa — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 19:11:30 +0000

Most public libraries offer complete, current access to NYTimes articles through their newspaper databases. People may consider checking in at their library before they decide to pay for content they can already access for free.

By: SelenesMom

SelenesMom — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 15:34:08 +0000

Have now cleared NYT links out of browser — if anything important is at NYT, it will be linked to elsewhere (I am still unclear on whether I can go to these articles from other sites for free or not?) or republished a day late in local paper.

By: Woltmann

Woltmann — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 14:08:25 +0000

News Corp isn’t going to be happy til they extract a £ of flesh from everybody who reads even one article of theirs. Unfortunately here in the States there aren’t suitable sustitutes for the NYT and WSJ like there are over in Wapping. Notice too that Vanneck-Smith’s ingenous marketing has decimated the flow of traffic to their online sites. No doubt the same Ruperturd will be layed in the States as Murdock continues his war on all journalism not-Fox.

By: SelenesMom

SelenesMom — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 13:23:34 +0000

This is a big mess and will surely be tossed in the chipper before long. This morning, while procrastinating, I went over to Most Popular Articles — New York Times in my browser, as I sometimes do, and fooled around for a while, having forgotten all about the paywall, despite numerous reminders, sort of like a library book — eventually exiting through Epicurean Dealmaker (also in my browser) and ending up here going “Oh $%^&, the paywall!”

By: ReformedBroker

ReformedBroker — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 12:25:44 +0000

Now how many frames of Ziggy or Garfield am I allowed prior to the paywall kicking in?

By: very-simple

very-simple — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:32:11 +0000

I don’t know how it’ll work now, but back in the day (i.e., 4 or 5 years ago), I had a weekend-only subscription to the Times, largely for the magazine, which gave me free access to the premium content (online crosswords, etc.). I had to move to italy for six months for work, and suspended my delivery for the full six months (which I believe was the maximum suspension period) – still ended up with access to the premium stuff for the full time I was away.

Don’t know if this is going to change with the new system, but if they built the full-site paywall on top of the existing premium content paywall, it’s possible it’ll work the same way.

By: GRRR

GRRR — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:14:10 +0000

Just following Paul Krugman will take me over the limit in less than a week, I suspect. We’ll see how this goes, but the future seems rather gloomy.