New York Times editor: "Serious discussion" about charging for online news

Jordan Golson — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:10:13 -0500

During a rare question and answer session with New York Times readers this week, executive editor Bill Keller addressed the possibility of once again charging for access to some or all of the New York Times website. Until recently, The Times put its columnists and archives behind a "paywall" -- the subscription barrier behind which readers must pay-to-play. That service, called "Times Select", did fairly well, generating "something like $10 million a year" according to Keller.

However, The Times decided that the paper would be better off taking down the paywall and allowing visitors to read whatever they wanted for free, and relying on advertising to cover the costs of newsgathering.

Keller then challenged the belief among some of the digerati that 'information wants to be free', saying "a lot of people in the news business, myself included, don't buy as a matter of theology that information 'wants to be free.' Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized and explained -- that stuff wants to be paid for." Right now, advertisers are paying for that -- but maybe a subscription plan, like those in effect at the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times could work.

That's Henry Blodget's theory anyway -- and it seems the Times may be considering it. Keller says there is a "lively, deadly serious discussion" at the Times about how to get consumers to pay for New York Times content on the nytimes.com website.

Here are the Times' top three solutions:

A subscription model. Times Select was not the answer, but it's possible we just put the wrong stuff behind the wall. Maybe we should put it all there, or some different slice of it. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times both have paid tiers in their Web sites. Rupert Murdoch, when he bought The Journal, talked about making the Web site free, but then he decided it made better sense to continue charging. Maybe the Journal/FT model is special, because its audience is disproportionately business executives who charge the cost to their expense accounts rather than ordinary readers spending their own money. The bigger argument against subscriptions is that they limit traffic, which limits ad revenues. Paid content tends not to show up in Web searches, which makes it less appealing to advertisers. They don't open their books, but if they did I'll bet you'd see that The Journal's Web site generates far less revenue than ours. But if Web advertising takes a long dive — or if some clever engineer figures out how to decouple a paid Web site from the search function — a subscription model might be worth a closer look.

A micro-payment model. The idea is that readers may not pay a subscription fee for a new Web site, but they might pay a few pennies every time they click on a page, if it was simple and frictionless. In the heyday of Napster and other steal-this-music Web sites, a lot of people believed that consumers would simply not pay money to download music. Enter Apple and iTunes.

New reading devices. The Times currently makes a modest amount of money selling a downloadable newspaper for Kindle users and for subscribers to a service called Times Reader. These services allow readers to load the entire paper into a portable device. In the case of Times Reader, the download has been especially designed to include full-color pictures, graphics and so forth. So some people are paying for The Times online. Just not enough of them. So far.

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New York Times editor: "Serious discussion" about charging for online news