
Nate Silver on the Times Pay Model and the Economics of Reporting - robg
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/a-note-to-our-readers-on-the-times-pay-model-and-the-economics-of-reporting/#
======
mixmax
Another perspective is that the way news sources and gathering is changing.
Nate looks at the number of citations and draws some good conclusions - but I
think he misses something important.

News aggregators, such as YC and Reddit sometimes link stories from New York
Times, Bloomberg and Al Jazeera, but at any one time one of the big news
outlets will be a small minority on the frontpage. Most of the content comes
from blogs, smaller sites, comments somewhere and specific sites associated
with a news event.

For instance, the recent nuclear disaster has been covered here on HN, but the
links are often to sites that are somewhat specific to the event in questions.
In this case sites like worldnuclearnews.org
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348824>) and theenergycollective
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2317356>). Chances are that I will never
visit these sites again, but for this one event they were indespensible.

If there was a biological terrorist attack in Copenhagen next week there's a
good chance that The Copenhagen Post (<http://www.cphpost.dk/>) would make the
frontpage of both Reddit and HN, but in there is not it won't. It's only an
interesting source for very specific events.

The Internet is changing news, and I don't think Nate's analysis takes that
into consideration, small sites won't show up in his analysis since they're
typically only quoted in relation to one story. Because of News aggregators I
don't get much of my news from the traditional outlets - I get it from experts
on the particular piece of news I'm reading about. That expert may be
wikipedia, it may be worldnuclearnews or it may be The copenhagen Post. The
important thing is instead of getting a lot of my news from one source I get
it from all over the place depending on what's happening in the world.

Besides I've often seen big news organizations pinch stories from Reddit
without any attribution.

------
jgamman
the problem with news as i see it is that being slightly above average most of
the time was useful until ubiquitous publishing/access was possible. even very
good reporters can't compete against a single story written by an expert in
the field. even cutting it down to the 1% of experts that can write for a lay
audience. news will increasingly become the search and deploy function of
finding what's current and collecting the bespoke in-depth reporting needed on
an ad-hoc basis. money will slosh around as needed.

------
SoftwareMaven
I hope the NYT is successful with this model. It is extremely close to "pay if
you think it is worth it", given the number of loop holes, which I would love
to see a major precidence for.

~~~
eli
Not really. There's no way to pay less than $15/month unless you pay nothing.
It's just a hunch, but I think most Times readers believe the website is worth
somewhere between nothing and $15.

~~~
tsotha
This. I don't care how they try to justify it. Only a handful of people are
going to pay $500/yr for a single website.

~~~
mhb
$15 x 13 = $195. How do you get $500/yr?

~~~
waterside81
I think he's including the cost of accessing the NYT across all platforms
(iPhone, iPad, web, print).

