Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Short Note on NYT subscriptions

The New York Times has a new policy in which regular readers will only get 20 free articles per month.  After that, you'll have to get a subscription to keep reading, with the exception that if you are reading based on an inbound link from a blog (like this one) or social media, you can read even if you don't subscribe and have used up your allowance of twenty free articles.

I approve of what the Times is doing.  Although it's not a perfect institution, I do read their website every day and it's struck me as crazy for some time that I can do so for free - there's clearly no future in that.  And since their paywall seems to be well designed such that I can safely link to articles there with the guarantee that all my readers will be able to read what I'm linking to, I intend to continue to do so freely.

If anyone runs into trouble reading Times articles linked here, let me know.
at

5 comments:

  1. TiradeFactionMarch 30, 2011 at 2:25 PM

    I'm not so sure paywalls will do so well for news media. I'll stick with the non paywalled ones myself :)

    Some might find a way around it with that exception though, I can imagine HTML documents traded around with all the latest links.

    ReplyDelete
  2. TiradeFactionMarch 30, 2011 at 3:10 PM

    Guardian's coverage of the issue.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/mar/30/jamesharding-digital-media

    ReplyDelete
  3. BrettMarch 30, 2011 at 5:49 PM

    I do read their website every day and it's struck me as crazy for some time that I can do so for free - there's clearly no future in that.

    Why not? There are plenty of news sources that sustain themselves on the model of "free content plus advertisements". The Times could probably sustain a slightly smaller version of itself if it went full-digital with the digital revenues it has (after cutting the part of the business costs involving in publishing a print edition).

    ReplyDelete
  4. BOPApril 6, 2011 at 12:11 PM

    With regard to the Times policy on free access via inbound links - I followed such a link today and it worked! No nags at all. But the article ran for two HTML pages and the second page pulled a complete blank; no payment, no view. So if you refer to something there you will need to provide URLs for all pages.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Stuart StanifordApril 6, 2011 at 3:04 PM

    BOP: Wow, sneaky...

    ReplyDelete