NY Times Steps Back 5 Years
// September 20th, 2005 // My Stuff, Technology Bits
You have to wonder what the guys at NY Times are thinking. They just announced a new service called TimesSelect. One of the things being made only available to TimeSelect subscribers is “daily columns from influential Op-Ed writers” according to the site. NY Times can not be blind to the Google Economy or to the rise of blogs. Increasingly bloggers who have their fingers on the pulse of politics, current events, and public interest stories are becoming the resource for people to get opinion pieces. So why would NY Times decide to launch a service that puts their colunists behind a pay service? Either they’re going bankrupt or there is a hidden agenda I’m not seeing. They have to be making plenty off their ad revenue on the site…
I’m planning on keeping an eye on their Alexa rank after they put this in place. I bet within a few months a significnat decline in traffic becomes apparent.
In a lot of ways I think this is sad, NY Times is fairly well known for its left slant which I’m not exactly opposed to…
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2012 
> Either they’re going bankrupt
> or there is a hidden agenda
3rd possibility: they’re clueless unimaginative idjits
– stan
“Increasingly bloggers … are becoming the resource for people to get opinion pieces.”
I’m a blogger, but I am not travelling around the world to interview people, draw opinions and work full time at it. Comparing Friedman and Dowd to Jarvis and Sullivan is silly.
News is a commodity. The Times seems to recognize that. Their multimedia features and OpEd columns have unique value. So do their archives.
Despite the fact that I hate the idea of having to pay for it, I think it was a very good idea to give it a try. Not only because it is a decent attempt to charge for unique content, but also because it rewards people for being subscribers to the print edition.
They’ve been trying different things like this for years, and this is the first paid service that stands a chance.
Just my $0.02.
Nice blog, btw.
George these are good points. Certainly there are costs to their unique service, especially where travel is involved. However, the Times runs ads on its site and I’m sure they are being paid a premium for them. It just seems to me that in a world that increasingly encourages open sharing of information, NYTimes is swimming upstream.
Where I do think their paid service is worth it is in providing access to old archived material. I also like that a print subscription gets you the online material as well.
Thanks for the comments.
I like to read Friedman, Krugman and Dowd. I can’t subscribe to NY Times as the mail is too slow to MN. I have been buying Friedman’s books but I guess I will cease to do this as I’m not about to pay for something I don’t use on a regular basis.
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