Link: Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site - New York Times.
Long-awaited, one of the most ridiculous decisions in the history of journalism has been reversed! I've ding-donged about the upcoming death of TimeSelect already, so I'll avoid too much gloating and instead focus on why the decision was so stupid and obviously ill-fated, to lock up a significant portion of the site, its "newspaper of record" historical archives, and influential stable of op-ed columnists, including two, Frank Rich and Paul Krugman, that this sorry excuse for a democracy can LITERALLY not be without.
What the Times essentially did was remove itself from the public agora, the forum, the space where democracy is deliberated, by trying to create a walled-garden of commodities to literally spit in the face of an evolving online "public square" or "commons."
The generica of strip mall and franchise nation has long gobbled up most of the physical public squares or commons, except for old venerated ones, like the Boston Commons. Levitown and the culture of the automobile has created a beast, the Burbs, to isolate people from more traditional senses of community, what Hannah Arendt would call our "civil society," or our less self-consciously active participation in our own communities, rather than staring into the passively-programmed sonambulism, the television.
I say less self-consciously active because sure, many people strive and work very hard at being active in their communities, and good for them. There was a time where just being alive and breathing meant you participated in your community, without having to drag yourself away from the TV to do it, rather than having to be guilted into making something for the bake sale or to participate in clean-up volunteer day at your local park.
I know people like to lump together time spent staring at the boob tube with time spent online, but I would argue that those spaces demand quantitatively different activities from our brains, the kinds of things the interactive version of the New York Times challenges us to do all the time, to talk back, argue, blog, Digg, bookmark, and so on. Yaddah yaddah, and let's all go read Michel de Certeau, "The Practice of Everyday Life," to see how ordinary people seize the day and control their own means of production.
Meanwhile, this is me making fun of what the Times has to say about its "taking down that firewall!"
Link: Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site - New York Times.
Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site
The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight.
The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.
In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.
The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.
“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.
What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYtimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.
“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.
[You know, just to belabor the point, but y'all may have not anticipated it, but if you had listened to the chorus of netizens AND new media theorists online, you would have found 80-90 percent of the people anticipating that explosion.
The New York Times may not have anticipated it, but just as MANY MANY people saw quite clearly the fiasco the US invasion of Iraq was to become, long before the ill-fated invasion ever began, a person really didn't have to rent a clue-by-four to know that building a walled garden in the open range of the public online agora would be a disaster, would effectively MUZZLE the newspaper's OWN VOICE.
It boggles the mind, how, in a world, an Information/Knowledge-based society where rising influence (whether in bits, wampum, poker chips, what-have-you) is worth more than any devaluing currencies, that a newspaper that wants to be essentially the nation's newspaper of record would deliberately undermine its own influence.
It would be like if you had nice sharp teeth, and you said, "You know what? These teeth are over-rated and get in the way of my big fat lolling tongue. I think I'm just going to pull these teeth out and de-fang myself. Yeah, that ought to increase my power and influence in the world. I ought to be able to reach more people, larger audiences that way."]
The Times’s site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site. Ms. Schiller would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to generate.
Those who have paid in advance for access to TimesSelect will be reimbursed on a prorated basis.
Colby Atwood, president of Borrell Associates, a media research firm, said that there have always been reasons to question the pay model for news sites, and that doubts have grown along with Web traffic and online ad revenue.
“The business model for advertising revenue, versus subscriber revenue, is so much more attractive,” he said. “The hybrid model has some potential, but in the long run, the advertising side will dominate.”
[...]
Many readers lamented their loss of access to the work of the 23 news and opinion columnists of The Times — as did some of the columnists themselves. Some of those writers have such ardent followings that even with access restricted, their work often appeared on the lists of the most e-mailed articles.
[...]
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