All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Just as the graveyards are full of indispensable men, so is the Information Superhighway strewn with financial model roadkill.

It’s 2007 and almost nobody has devised a sustainable way of making money on content online. Heck, I spent a semester worth of grad school ten years ago – writing a hundred pages – looking into Internet financial models and could only end up with a heavily-footnoted shrug.* That was back in the days when Slate.com was still attempting to charge $19.95 for a yearly subscription. (They were saved by Microsoft in 1999.)

The problem, of course, is that you can find (almost) anything out on the web for free. So there’s absolutely no incentive to pay. Back in November 2005, the New York Times decided that they had figured out a way around this problem – a hybrid experiment where they would offer their news content for free, but charge for the unique commentary of Tom Friedman, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, et al. So they began “TimesSelect” and began charging non-subscribers $49.95 to access the opinion page online.

Read full post…

First The New York Times took its all-star stable of opinion columnists, put them in the TimesSelect pen, and started charging admission to read them. Now it turns out, according to Editor & Publisher’s Joe Strupp, you even have to pay to e-mail them:

“Back in September the Times asked the hundreds of papers who publish the Op-Ed contributors through The New York Times News Service (NYTNS) to stop printing the writers' e-mail addresses with the columns (and to take the columns off their Web sites, too). Apparently not everyone got the message, because last week the Times' syndication service sent out an advisory reminding its client papers to remove the e-mail addresses.



‘If you are not a TimesSelect subscriber you won't have access to that e-mail functionality,’ Times spokesman Toby Usnik confirmed Tuesday. ‘It centralizes [the columnists' e-mails] around the TimesSelect site.’



But instead of being able to put an address in a mail program and firing it off at your leisure, TimesSelect subscribers now have to fill out an online form similar to the generic feedback forms found on many Web sites.”

And more from The Times:

“Usnik denied that the limit on e-mails was an effort to get readers at newspapers syndicating the columnists to pay for TimesSelect instead of their local paper. ‘That is not the intent,’ Usnik said. But when asked what those newspaper readers should do to be able to contact the columnists, he urged them to sign up and pay the additional fee. ‘The recommendation would be that they consider subscribing to TimesSelect.’”

Since The Times established TimesSelect, there’s been a fair amount of grumbling on the Web about it and plenty of efforts to spread the content outside of the subscription wall (the paper’s columnists are routinely among the most-searched terms on sites like Technorati). With news that only subscribers can contact the writers, you can expect a little more grumbling, although probably not much. After all, if you’re not reading their work, you don’t have much to talk to them about.

Read full post…

They don’t call it the news business for nothing but don’t try telling that to a blogosphere up in arms over the launch of the New York Times’ new premium content service, TimesSelect. For $7.95 per month, or $49.95 for an entire year, anyone who doesn’t already subscribe to the paper can now access its op-ed columnists, archives and other material. Of course up until now you could get them for free, thus the animosity from the Web.



A quick glance at the blog search engine Technorati shows this was one of the most-discussed topics yesterday and a look at some of the reaction is less-than favorable on any number of levels. It’s not surprising. After all, free speech is the blogosphere standard.



It all does seem to be a ponderous move from the Times. On the one hand, the paper’s columnists – Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman among others – are often the lynchpins for the debates that happen on the Web. Despite all the attacks on the mainstream media, it’s folks like this who still largely set the agenda – or at least supply the ammunition. But will an audience used to getting it for free really start to pay? Doesn’t the paper stand to gain more from promoting its voices than from hiding them? And will they be able to keep material from getting out, if not in full, then at least in part?



As good as it is, I wouldn’t want to pay to read Public Eye – or any other blog for that matter. And it seems the trend in Internet news is toward more free content, especially video, supported by advertising and the move by the Times flies in the face of that. Of course, it’s somewhat hypocritical for me to join in on the Times-bashing. After all, my last job was for a publication that charged substantially more than $49.95 a year!



We’ll be curious to follow the debate over this and the future success of TimesSelect. Will you subscribe?

Read full post…