We desperately need the continued work of serious investigative journalism outfits. Even the existence of organizations able (willing?) to report fact-checked stories held to a high editorial standard seems tenuous. These businesses are not a public service but in my estimation all Americans benefit from an independent fourth estate.
If you read NYT articles with any regularity I strongly urge you to subscribe. For me the cost of a digital subscription is trivial relative to the value I get from it.
Micropayments have failed constantly since the .com bubble days.
The whole thing with micropayments is that the content creator is hoping that the cost to purchase the article is going to be low enough to where the user isn't going to notice the money.
But they will notice. You're forcing a person to read a headline (and maybe a half paragraph intro) and then deciding if it's actually worth buying the article. That's a decision that the average person is not going to put up with.
The best solution is to support publications that produce consistent and high quality content. The best model for this (that we know of) is recurring payment.
So I've been debating subscribing to the NYT, but the sheer number of options has delayed me from doing it. My wife and I both love crosswords and would love to get access to the crosswords, and I'd like to get a subscription to support journalism. Last time I looked it wasn't really clear to me which subscription(s) I should get so I delayed the choice.
Now I find myself actively avoiding most NYT links because I want to "save them" for the stories I'm really interested in which means in general I almost never click on a NYT link anymore. So now I'm wondering if I should even bother subscribing. This seems like it will make me even less likely to subscribe, especially since I don't want to reward this business tactic.
I just signed up for the nytimes a couple days ago, and was exactly in the same position (I wanted articles + crosswords for myself and my SO). You want All Access which gets you two accounts with full access including crosswords (including mobile app). For the first year it's 8 dollars a month all-in, which seems like a pretty amazing deal. I think this may be a temporary sale.
Full disclosure: the tactic mentioned in this post roped me into subscribing last month. But, I did not do it for the same reasons as you. I just noticed I wanted to read more articles they were posting.
The Guardian is a bit different situation because they have the Greenwald/Snowden legacy under their belts and a general reputation for truthiness, but I struggle to see how subscribing to NYT inspires better journalism.
Is the theory that less dependence on ads would allow them to publish material on touchy subjects that would otherwise get demonized? I would like to support a cause like that but I don’t see how this would be it.
I got a WSJ subscription a year ago and have really enjoyed it. Specifically I've enjoyed the paper version of the paper. Online news sites are too easy (maybe just how I've been conditioned) to glance over headlines and only read the stuff I'm interested in. With the paper version I find myself reading news stories I would have otherwise ignored.
Having a curated set of articles that a physical paper gives you is nice. There are ways this can be done with digital news sources as well, but the different medium has worked out for me to help broaden the topics I read.
Have you discovered their e-reader? Stumbled across it accidentally one day and have found it perfect for posting articles on bulletin boards without cutting up my paper, you can print PDFs of individual articles, choosing between text or photocopy: http://ereader.wsj.net/
Obnoxiously, I've seen some sites start using JS to block users in Incognito mode. (For example, MIT Technology Review -- technologyreview.com -- does this on their article pages.)
If you're thinking about subscribing and you want to save some money just cancel. I've been subscribed for a month and this is the result: https://imgur.com/fHETGuW (that's been going on for three months or so).
I found the app hard to use. I think the problem I had with it was that it wasn't clear to me which articles are new and which are old. But I'm not sure anymore.
I haven't reviewed the policy recently, but I believe the digital crossword subscription is totally separate from the digital news subscription. So if you are more interested in the crossword, you can subscribe to just that without subscribing to news. And if you did subscribe to just news, it wouldn't come with the digital crossword.
It’s a pity there isn’t a model like music has (bet no one has ever said that before).
A subscription service which divvys out my subscription fee to the authors (or papers?) that published the stories I read.
Search by region, topic, author, paper etc. I’d pay more than I pay for Spotify and I currently pay zero for news.
I'll subscribe to the NYT again when they stop requiring you to phone them to unsubscribe.
I was a previous subscriber, and when I wanted to unsubscribe, I discovered there was no way to do it online. This is, of course, an intentional move to make it hard to unsubscribe.
I recently cancelled two subscriptions I had started online and had to call for both of them.
One was moderately annoying as the call center menu hid the ‘unsubscribe’ option about five layers deep, although once I found it I had a brief and reasonably efficient conversation to sort things out.
For the other subscription, I had an absolutely painful discussion with a woman on another continent who kept pretending to misunderstand me and offering to “suspend” my subscription for two months.
After several attempts to be reasonable and being treated like a fool, I had to raise my voice and express some anger before she suddenly became able to understand me. :(
Any future subscriptions of mine will be through a trusted third party like amazon or only with services that have proven they don’t suck at customer service.
This move seems to betray a lack of nuance in understanding of readers by the NYT. To be clear, I find the idea of paying for journalism and news media, in combination with or instead of ad support, to be compelling and important. However, I think it is also important to recognize the pragmatic value of the decision to offer free content, when this is the norm on the internet.
The NYT has lost a great deal of trust from it's readers in recent years, including those of various political and social leanings. Many opposed to the growth of populist, right-wing movements in the US (and to a degree abroad) see the NYT as emblematic of a news media more interested in humanistically profiling far-right extremists, including self-avowed white nationalists, than in highlighting their evils. They also find the NYT to be a major nexus of sensationalist coverage of the Trump presidential campaign and administration, distracting from balanced and substantial coverage of the race in favor of an obsession with email scandals and essentially unimportant (but amusing or provocative) actions by Trump and his entourage. On the other side of the American political divide, many have found the 'failing' NYT to be unrepresentative of their experiences as Americans, and have begun to dismiss it's coverage as partisan and often distorted. The paper's attempts to introduce balanced coverage, especially in the editorial pages, has been met with vitriol from both liberals and conservatives. Outside of partisan politics, coverage of issues like the Las Vegas massacre have been criticized by many as sensationalizing the attack and encouraging copycats, including by academics. When the most venerated news institution in the United States cannot heed what is increasingly accepted in academia and abroad as responsible reporting procedures for mass attacks, it is concerning.
Journalism need not be free to consumers, and I personally believe it would be better off as a directly subscribed medium with little to no ad support. But this does not seem an appropriate or strategic time for a newspaper that desperately needs to rebuild its trust with readers (especially with young millennials) to ask for more subscription dollars. I have heard of many people who have cancelled or allowed to lapse subscriptions to the NYT (subscriptions I was surprised to learn they had) over the issues I've mentioned. Subscription volume may be up, but I suspect deeper trends in subscriber and nonsubscriber perceptions are at work and this change will damage the NYT in the long run. Of course, this is a fragile time for news media, especially print, and it is not surprising to see a paper opting for short-term earnings.
> Many opposed to the growth of populist, right-wing movements in the US (and to a degree abroad) see the NYT as emblematic of a news media more interested in humanistically profiling far-right extremists, including self-avowed white nationalists, than in highlighting their evils.
Many opposed to the growth of populist, right-wing movements in the US would like their newspapers to provide reporting and understanding, which can include "humanistic profiles" of people we don't like. The last thing I want from journalism (outside the opinion pages) are stories selected to highlight or build support for a particular opinion, as justified as that opinion may be.
> On the other side of the American political divide, many have found the 'failing' NYT to be unrepresentative of their experiences as Americans, and have begun to dismiss it's coverage as partisan and often distorted. The paper's attempts to introduce balanced coverage, especially in the editorial pages, has been met with vitriol from both liberals and conservatives.
IIRC, the NYT has long been regarded the voice of liberal orthodoxy. Any attempts change that (if they are in fact happening) are going to be painful but also needed and welcome (by me at least).
> The NYT has lost a great deal of trust from it's readers in recent years
We need some evidence of the level of trust and its change over time. I've read such things about the NY Times since I first learned of its existence. It seems to be the nature of journalism, telling people uncomfortable, undesirable things about red-hot issues.
The NYT's digital subscriptions have been increasing steadily for quite some time [1], and while their print subscription has fallen by approximately half since 2001 [2][3], they have more digital subscribers now (2.5 million) [4] then they had papers in circulation in 2001 (1.1 million for the weekly, 1.7 million for Sunday) [2].
That doesn't seem to suggest that the NYT has lost trust from all of its readers, to be honest.
That's different than uncomfortable challenging, comfort zones and so forth. Here we see misleading headlines to drive traffic.
Next, I lean left and yet found the NYT obsessively copycatting Democratic institutional thinking: supporting corrupt NY Mayors, relentlessly defending lost Presidential candidates despite nefarious behaviors, and in years past as Chomsky demonstrates, beating the drums of war in foreign policy. I found them obsessing over race and gender divides, even if it meant eclipsing greater threats. Transgender policy and statues, in. Redistribution of wealth to the rich... too complicated to obsess over.
They've run negative coverage on people I admire, like Chomsky and Sanders, because those buck the trends within a fractured Left.
Next, I live in NY and find their local coverage heavily biased with stories of the idle rich. I'd love to send examples of this, but I'm pretty sure I have one article left to read this month.
I pay for a 15 dollar a month, Kindle subscription to the Financial Times because of the thoughtful, in-depth analysis, sometimes with multiple viewpoints in different articles on one topic, and a FAR less American-centric information resource. When it comes to politics, being culturally myopic is a sin that the NYT is in my unhumble opinion guilty of.
I know about Chomsky's criticisms and those accusations. I'm not commenting on their accuracy; I'm saying they are old news. The question is, do we have data showing that the level of trust has changed recently, or even what that level is?
>On the other side of the American political divide, many have found the 'failing' NYT to be unrepresentative of their experiences as Americans, and have begun to dismiss it's coverage as partisan and often distorted.
Americans are now the most divided along party lines since 1990s.
I think NYT are just mirroring the reality. Hiring climate change deniers as columnists, profiling neo-nazis while at the same time actually doing their job WRT Trump (compare to the Iraq War and sensational Judy Miller headlines).
> They also find the NYT to be a major nexus of sensationalist coverage of the Trump presidential campaign and administration, distracting from balanced and substantial coverage of the race in favor of an obsession with email scandals and essentially unimportant (but amusing or provocative) actions by Trump and his entourage.
Disagree. I think they are just covering the reality and sometimes go to the absurd length to remain "impartial" and give all sides to the story, no matter how ridiculous they are.
---
I agree with you WRT covering mass shootings, but perhaps it's bigger problem than journalism, so that's why it never changes. If it bleeds, it leads.
Also I posted this recently WRT Richard Spencer types: they are mostly attention-craving nobodies, so the media is essentially amplifying their message.
I've been reading the NYT since my high school government teacher told me about it. It is far and away the best reporting I know of. I consider myself left-leaning and typically in agreement with the opinion section.
Yet the last year of straight Trump derangement, especially things like its relentless daily excoration of the tax bill over the past month, has finally started to chip away at my respect for the grey lady.
So, if you're a long time reader of the NY Times, clue me in to what sets it apart as a valuable source of information. Respectfully, I don't currently understand what others see in it as an information source.
Look at the front page right now:
Flynn pleads guilty (news, public record - the exception!)
Republicans say they'll pass the tax plan in the Senate (probably a press release or word from a PR office)
Rex Tillerson might be replaced by someone even worse than himself (probably a press release or word from a PR office, posturing)
A meta-regurgitation of sex harassment news (posturing)
Why North Korea's missile is very scary (almost certainly a statement from a public relations office in the SK government, in collaboration with the US government, since it includes a statement about a phone call between the respective heads of state)
A string of variety fluff blog posts (entertainment).
I care about quality journalism, but these articles are mostly posturing/outrage-jockeying or fluff, and what news there is consists in barfing up press releases or statements from public relations offices, spiced up with a little expert vetting from whomever they could get on the phone. It reads like a textbook dystopian "Manufacturing Consent" newspaper.
So, I don't know. I pay for a subscription to a few news outlets (a few of whom are can be just as bad as the NYTimes, such as NPR), but I certainly don't see a reason to pay a premium for name brand news that isn't any more substantive than skimming AP reports off a news feed.
WaPo is $4 a month for the 50% of US households who have Amazon Prime. That's about a quarter of the price of what NYT is asking for, with a quality and political bent that's fairly similar. NYT can't compete until its on a much closer pricing footing.
The NYT site and app are VASTLY superior to the Post's. I subscribe to both and find that I turn to the NYT more often because the reading experience is so much better.
I signed up for that. One of the many frustrating things about recent US politics is that I needed to at all. I was mostly pretty good with The Economist for national news coverage. A few articles every week covering the highlights. Too much is happening too fast for them to keep up these days.
I'm happy to pay for good journalism, but I'm not paying separate subscriptions to every decent newspaper.
If they had some sort of alliance with the Post and the Tribune, or something like that it would be very cool. As it is, I recently signed up for the Washington Post which means I now have to cancel the New York Times. :(
People have money to spend, but you need to offer them some better options than the current model of paying separately for every news outlet.
> Scoops on the Trump administration’s scandals and sexual-harassment allegations in Hollywood have already contributed to a surge in Times subscriptions
Earlier today HN had the article about Japanese elderly, which was a sad and wonderful read and I highly recommend it. I wish NYT had more of this long-form, thoughtful "teach me something about life elsewhere" reporting, instead of a "what crazy thing did Trump do today" tabloid-ism.
If you haven't already, check out the New Yorker. It's a weekly magazine, so obviously not quite the same, but what you're describing is their bread and butter.
Subscribing to the NYT will get you access to the Magazine and the archive which holds thousands upon thousands of articles that are more like what you describe here.
One thing not to miss when you get a subscription to the NYT, Washington Post, WSJ, or other large newspaper/magazine is the access to the archive of articles.
If you like long-form, feature-style articles instead of current events news, there is enough stuff in the NYT archives that you'd never be able to read it all.
Note that a lot of public libraries and universities provide free one day access to the NYTimes, and by using such passes you are supporting the company as there are fees paid when users take advantage of these things.
I'd like to do my part and support good journalism and pay for my NYT articles on a per article basis, say 5c-15c per article. They won't let me.
Strictly speaking as a consumer, Am I the only person who doesn't like subscriptions? Do the subset of masses who are willing to pay for journalism really prefer subscriptions over one time use payments? I guess i'm just weird.
> Strictly speaking as a consumer, Am I the only person who doesn't like subscriptions? Do the subset of masses who are willing to pay for journalism really prefer subscriptions over one time use payments? I guess i'm just weird.
I don't think Americans in general like metering. There's a lot of resistance to data caps and cell phone plans are heading towards being "unlimited." The thing that sucks about one time use payments is that you're either thinking "do I really want to pay for this little action?" all the time or you don't and get surprised by your bill.
Though I wouldn't mind paying $10/month for a subscription that included unlimited access to one major news site and up to $5/month credit for metered access to others. Unfortunately, the realities of competition will prevent that.
I don't like this. I get the NYT and The Washington Post delivered. My wife reads the NYT on-line quite a bit, I read it only occasionally on-line. With 10 articles per month, I'm fine not logging in. Now, I have to find out our subscriber information.
The NY Times paywall has got to be one of the easiest paywalls to bypass. You can either browse its site in private/incognito mode (or using Firefox Focus on mobile), delete a cookie, or disable Javascript on their site (though this isn't ideal when viewing some of their interactive pieces). I wonder if this is a deliberate compromise to ensure that nobody is ever really locked out of their content.
Subject to change at any time of course. I used to enjoy the occasional article from WSJ, now I just get annoyed when I see one of their headlines because I know I can't read the article.
Good to see ad support media going away. The programmatic publishing model is a failure on many fronts. As the online payment options sought in recent years, back to subscription is a sensible choice and I will happily follow.
I’m a subscriber, started at $14 a month, and now I pay about $7 a month after calling to see if they’d let me latch on to a promo rate.
I don’t understand this hostility toward paywalls or paying for a subscription. Just a generation ago, most households paid for newspaper subscriptions, and even some magazines. I am happy to pay for the journalism from what I consider to be a high quality news source. It makes me a better-informed individual.
Many of the users of HN are attempting to monetize a service or product using a subscription model. Yet you don’t want to support a newspaper doing the same thing? Do you feel that the journalism should be free, or free to you? If so, why do you feel that entitlement?
News sources such as WSJ, NYT, Economist provide education and value to individuals and society, and people who earn enough to get a Starbucks on the way to work and go to the gym on the way home (also a subscription model) should not have this level of disdain for the idea of paying for content from a reputable newspaper.
Just a generation ago, most households paid for newspaper
subscriptions, and even some magazines.
I'm forming this hypothesis on the fly, but I wonder if people had a deep-seeded notion that they were paying for the delivery (the paper, ink, on their doorstep) vs. the content. "I pay for you to bring the news to me" where today, "I come to your forum to hear what's going on."
I'm also wondering if there needs to be more journalism as a public good—or a nonprofit. Not tabloids or 24-hour-newscycle hysteria, but true investigative reporting.
All these subscriptions are starting to add up so I don't want more. I wonder if they lowered their prices whether they could make up for it by more subscribers. I guess they have run the numbers...
What we're really missing is an analog to the old "stick a quarter in the machine, get a newspaper" model
Plenty of people would gladly pay a bit of money to get access to a day's news when they want to, without a subscription. But it has to be easy, not "type in all my credit card info to get one paper".
Things like visa checkout, probably with browser integration would work well. I wonder if mozilla could push forward with it, as I doubt chrome would be okay not getting a slice of the pie from the fees somehow
It's a great point. The article and much of the discussion frame these issues around business and profitability, but the NYT's mission is to inform the public not to make lots of money. Paywalls must, IMHO, greatly limit the success of that mission. No doubt they will soon publish another article about how misinformed the public is.
The same applies to scientific publishers. The mission of science is to advance and disseminate knowledge, but only the elite few - the professional researchers with funding - can access scientific knowledge. Scientists complain that the public believes anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers, but then deny them access to the science.
It seems that even as late as 2017, these old institutions haven't adjusted to the Internet's free distribution; they still try to force their square old pay-for-distribution models, which made sense created when paper had to be printed and shipped, into the round holes - or maybe better, the pressureless vacuum - of the Internet. From the point of view of their missions, to disseminate knowledge, the Internet is a fantasy too good to even imagine - free, instant, global distribution to most of humanity - but still they can't see it. Perhaps institutions don't change with the times, they just die and are replaced by a new generation.
We are patiently waiting for the dinosaurs to die out. They will die. And then we'll move into their homes. - Kurt Cobain
I won't pay. I look often, mostly following headlines from 'Real Clear Politics' (which has both left and right-leaning links).
NYT leans too far left for my tastes, I won't pay to support that. I'll read free articles (to try to gain perspective from the other side) but no way will I pay.
do any of these publishers have paywalls for specific premium articles rather than x articles per week? presumably they could a/b and tweak more that way
I would love this feature. NYT does real investigative journalism and should be paid for that, but it annoys me to no end when I'm browsing my news feed and click a fluff article as a time waster and it's a WaPo or NYT article and I see my counter for the month go up.
> NYT does real investigative journalism and should be paid for that
The problem is that's the stuff I wish the most people had easy access to, or order to build momentum to fix the problems. For instance, I post a link to their series on binding arbitration every time that comes up somewhere. That's a good example of something that doesn't sound bad until someone explains it to you.
I'm fine with those being a limited number of articles per month. If its something important that needs to be shared with people who don't follow the news regularly, then it shouldn't matter if you can only view 5-10 articles a month. If you're regularly following the news and are consuming all of their most important pieces that will matter historically, then you should be paying for it.
Yep they could have a lot of fun gaming with it for breaking news, sports results, deep analysis pieces etc. Could even personalise what gets charged to who depending on core obsessions (this proof of insight would be huge with advertisers as well)
If there is anything more toxic than social media, it's traditional media. If you value your mental health, uninstall facebook, end your subscription to NYTimes/WaPo/news media, turn off foxnews and go do something else.
Why doesn't New York Times et al just go for the full donation model? Make the articles free, put a bug Jimmy Wales-style banner at the top, probably rake in more money.
Are they still pretending like they're a prestigious institution or something?
If you read NYT articles with any regularity I strongly urge you to subscribe. For me the cost of a digital subscription is trivial relative to the value I get from it.