The Economist's newsstand price is quite high, but if you have a subscription, it's not that much of a premium that I have to `gladly pay'. I am quite a dedicated reader, though, and read the thing cover to cover almost every week.
The key to the fourth estate is to separate it from biased monetary concerns: government funding (can be cut if critical of the government) and corporate funding (aka ads- if you criticize the advertisers, they leave).
If news can effectively transition to direct reader support, it is a good thing for everyone.
NYT has yet to prove that this direction is profitable...
The problem then, of course, is that readers will abandon you if you don't tell them what they want to hear. You end up creating an echo chamber for political ideology X or economic policy Y.
There are some readers that do want journalists to hold everyone's feet to the fire though. Freed from the pressure of advertiser sensitivity maybe we will see more journalists taking a stronger tone. The questions if there are enough paying readers to support a robust newsroom.
I disagree; corporate funding (ads and advertisers) need not have influence over the institution itself in order to place ads in a news source. From a journalistic standpoint, your value is based upon how trustworthy you are as a company. If you are trustworthy, you have readers, and you will never be short on advertisers.
Readers can stop reading if the newspaper stops agreeing with its viewpoints perhaps even more readily than advertisers can. Coming from Utah most of the uber-conservatives that live near me mock the New York Times as propaganda yet watch Fox News and call it "truth." Unfortunately, as was mentioned offhand in Aaron Sorkin's "Newsroom," today, "People don't choose the opinions they want, they choose the facts they want." Reader supported is just as prone to bias as is corporate supported.
> If you are trustworthy, you have readers, and you will never be short on advertisers.
This works extremely well with small publishers or niche markets: Mother Jones can criticize Monsanto while publishing ads for organic food, and Penny Arcade can make fun of Blizzard while still running Blizzar ads (they can always run ads from Valve instead if they don't).
But for a mass market publisher like NYT, a large advertiser with a steady ad budget absolutely wields an influence over content, even if they never say a word. Suits at media companies have every incentive not to rock the boat, and so soften stories, or simply focus more effort on news that is unlikely to threaten ad revenue (ie, crime and celebrity news). Occasionally, this kind of self-censorship is blatant, like the infamous Fox/Monsanto milk hormone story, but usually the effect is subtle, like the warping of a gravitational field.
Admittedly, readers do create their own distortion effect on news, perhaps even bigger than advertisers. But since that's a factor either way, I still see reduced reliance on advertising as a positive trend in mass media.
>corporate funding (ads and advertisers) need not have influence over the institution itself in order to place ads in a news source.
That's only as true as long as the source in question can continue to exist without the support of the advertisers. As supplemental income (like NPR does), it's fine, because if an advertiser tries to throw their weight around, the outfit can just tell them to get lost.
However, if advertising is a primary source of income, that gives the advertiser a disproportionate amount of power over the content of that source, because every battle can become "Do this or we drop funding".
An interesting sidebar (not mentioned in the NYMag piece) is that the $88 million loss is due to a write down of $194.7 for About.com [1]. About.com reportedly took a heavy traffic hit from the Google Panda/Penguin update.
Not that I have a problem with this exactly, whenever ad dollars start falling many large scale web properties have historically reacted in one of two ways: (1) providing a premium based subscription service that forces quality content or users will drop (the opposite of this being a free, impression driven, quality agnostic model by splitting up articles over multiple pages) or (2) increasing ad costs which in turn results in more scrutiny in what is being fed through the ad engine.
These aren't the gold standards, please keep that in mind; it's purely anecdotal. I threw this observation over at a friend who is a professional affiliate marketer and has his own four man firm, he concurs. When ad dollars drop, media companies fight for whatever revenue normalcy they can get by improving quality in the two areas users have the biggest impact: interacting with your media and interacting with the ads supporting said media.
The real headline is that the NYT is supported by neither, but gets more money from subscribers than advertisers. It will be interesting to see if they can get enough subscribers to become profitable again.
The NYTimes is the official mouthpiece for the US government, no matter who is in the White House. They will never be allowed to fail. (until some other mouthpiece for the White House emerges)
Before you 'junk' me, why not read the words the editor of the NYTimes, Bill Keller, spoke 2 years ago:
If you think retaining some information at the behest of a government or source makes you a corrupt broker of information... Then there's never been a pure news agent ever.
I want the NY Times to stay around, so I bought their digital delivery. What rubs me the wrong way is the arbitrary distinction between devices...
You pay more for nytimes.com + iPhone + iPad. It's a little silly. Charge me 1 price regardless of where I consume it! I bought the full $4.38 / week plan but I think it's too much when it goes to $8.75. I can switch to paying $3.75 and just instapaper all the articles I want to my iPad.
In my case, it was cheaper to pay for a physical Sunday delivery subscription which includes digital. I don't really want the Sunday paper, but it's a better deal.
I agree. In fact I held off for a long time just b/c the pricing is so...stupid.
They have three different plans combining web, smartphone, and tablets. All priced by the week, charged by the month.
Then a totally standalone Kindle plan. I don't even know what the plans are for Nook, Sony Reader, or Kobo Reader (all mentioned on their digital subscription page without pricing).
Ugh. If I think about this any more I'll be forced to cancel my Kindle subscription.
Newspapers are no longer the primary, or most effective connecting point for ideas and information between people.
From where I see it, Tomorrow's generation simply doesn't use newspapers the same way as anyone has in the last 200 years.
Paywalls are another kiss of death for newspapers that are already searching for relevancy in today's world. I have zero clue why they're doing them again, they had tried them before and failed. Short of industry wide collusion, if one paper in town charges, and the other doesn't, all the online traffic will go to the free one. Not to mention we can get more information, quicker, from multiple sources online and it's only going to get easier.
The rise of bloggers on newspaper websites shows how many other places we're willing to get our information.
I don't want newspapers to go away. I like the experience of reading a paper. It's almost relaxing compared to the constant distractions from screens.
Still they're massively laying off people and not publishing on certain days. Newspapers need to find a way to make money and be sustainable. Maybe there's a middle of a new kind of subscription of not getting access to the articles right away without paying.
My background: Worked in the newspaper industry for 4 years around the last dotcom boom. Remember the horror then..
With the proliferation of "noise news" online, I find that my two options for filtering the noise are (1) peer curated sites like HN, or (2) to pay for (what is hopefully) quality writing from sources such as NYT or the Economist.
Check out how many HN articles on Sundays come from the NYTimes. They put out an enormous volume of high quality content that a lot of people seem to find relevant.
Oh, the content is relevant. Just not the newspaper.
Or in other words, the package deal in which I have to pay for content that is 90% irrelevant to me, distributed (even online) in a way I consider quite inconvenient.
Which is exactly why I only read a very small subset of NYT's content via HN. Unfortunately, there's no convenient way to pay for that kind of usage.
But I don't feel sorry for the newspapers about that. They've had decades to invest in solving that problem, and most of them have invested exactly 0 cents. They've thrown millions at online publishing and keeping their offline business going, but when it came to investing in the one thing that could possibly give their future readers what they actually want, they just bitched about "the market" not providing them with a convenient solution.
The majority of the BBC's revenue comes from the British government, which mandates a nearly £146 "licensing fee" to every person in Britain who receives access to broadcast television. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Revenue
This in stark contrast to the NYT, where readers voluntarily opt to fund the paper by purchasing subscriptions.
However much like NHK here in Japan, it wouldn't be at all surprising if many people simply snubbed the collections guy because they don't own a TV, don't watch BBC, or just don't want to pay.
"The latest official evasion rate for the United Kingdom is 5.2% of all licensable places (for the 2009/10 financial year). The official evasion rate estimates the percentage (not the number) of all premises (not individuals or households) evading the licence fee in the UK. It is calculated for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport using a model that compares the number of licences in force to external statistics on the number of households and other licensable places in the UK."
This is based on data that suggests "Under 3% of UK households don’t have a television set (this figure does not include other premises like businesses)." Approximately 25 million TV licenses are in force.
Possibly there is more evasion in things like holiday homes and caravans, which should be licensed. But generally data suggests, as does my anecotal evidence, that most UK home-owners just see the TV license as a standard bill that is paid annually.
Interesting, thanks for the info. This article (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20060801zg.html) is a couple years old but give a decent summary in English of what the situation is here. An official billing with all the necessary legal documentation would probably go a lot further than some of the goons going around as collection agents.
Sorry, I should have said supported predominantly by the readers. The advertising accounts for a minimal amount of its revenue, and certainly does not subsidise the international traffic.
"Supported by the readers" is an extremely (and intentionally) misleading title. Reader revenue has only just surpassed advertiser revenue, and The New York Times still has huge net losses quarter after quarter (this round we're talking $88.1 million).
Also, I can't be the only one that finds the tone of the article ironic considering how hard it was to work your way through the spammy ads before actually reading it.
Is that really the right word to use? Greedy people have enough of something but still want more. The New York Times is losing money. I don't think any of their efforts to make money could be called greedy.
It's not my fault if they are operating at a very high cost is it? A company that wants me to pay for its content and sprinkle its ads around it is greedy for sure.
Paid content or ads. Pick one. Picking both obviously isn't working.
This is the same problem with The Economist's digital subscription. Really annoying full-screen click through ads between a lot of pages. And generally these seem to be just one or two different ads in one issue, so they're not interesting either.
I find it unacceptable to have any advertisement mingling with content that I have paid for. I stopped reading magazines long ago (before the internet was a real alternative) for this reason. After a person purchases something, they should be treated like a customer, not treated like a product.
Would you rather pay considerably more to have an ad-free version? And even if yes, can you persuade their other readers to do that too?
Covering the cost of a service with both customer payment and advertising is... everywhere. Do you also get pissed off when you go to a cinema, watch TV, go to a sports game, ride on a bus, etc etc?
I would be willing to either pay more for something completely ad-free or not pay at all. I probably would not pay considerably more. How much extra does a magazine get from advertising? I thought it would be like three or four dollars per issue.
Yes I also do not enjoy being advertised to when watching a movie or TV, so I seldom do it. I don't feel as bad on the bus, although I'm not sure why, since as you point out it is roughly the same thing.
I think it's the presentation of ads in the midst of content VS ads off to the side on the bus.
Anyway, thank you for that thought-provoking comment.
Is the bus not the same as the magazine, where you can go "oh look an advert, I'll just ignore that and get back to my content"?
I'm not sure about the value of magazine adverts, I've never worked in print advertising,MIT even at a few dollars that would mean you have to pay double. If they raised prices to do that, the higher price could/would drive some people away, meaning you'd then have to pay more to cover those lost sales..
I've been thinking about this, and I believe there is a distinction since on the bus I am paying for the conveyance, not the content, so at no point do I ever consciously look at the advertising. For a magazine, I am consciously reading the content and they are putting advertising where my attention is directed. It doesn't help that the advertisements in a magazine pad it out so it looks like it has more content than it would otherwise.
I think that is more like a bus that detours to certain shops instead of taking shorter routes. You'd be paying for the conveyance and they would be abusing that by taking your time to gain themselves more money.
This is expected. The "free" income from advertising goes down, many papers who only make a partial effort get in trouble, leaving more of the market free, and then the best papers who do have real value and produce real value conquer that market. That's because people are willing to pay for their paper if only they can choose theirs from a smaller set of quality papers rather than from a gazillion advertisement-funded attempts at journalism.
What I don't get about newspapers in the US in general, is that it seems that their adoption is extremely low, compared to European countries. NY Times, supposedly the third largest newspaper, has a daily circulation of 1mm whereas De Telegraaf (the biggest newspaper in The Netherlands, a country with a population of only 16mm) has a daily circulation of 700K!
Why is that, don't people read newspapers in the US?
The New York City metro area has a population of about 20M. NYT has only really expanded into the national market in the last 15 years. It is primarily a local/regional paper. NYC has a higher periodical subscription rate than other regions, partly due to the reliance on mass transit. NYT competes with the Wall Street Journal and other local/regional dailies.
I think people in the US read a lot of local papers. If you sum them up it should be more than the 1mm readers of the NY Times. That's because the US is huge compared to Holland and people everywhere tend to be primarily interested in what are the most immediate news to them.
[1] http://www.economistgroup.com/results_and_governance/annual_...