The New York Times plans to scrap its two-year-old TimesSelect subscription service and once again make all of the newspaper's columns available for free online, according to a report in today's New York Post.
The move comes amid speculation that under Rupert Murdoch's ownership, The Wall Street Journal will stop charging for content in favor of an ad-supported business model.
The Journal has historically charged users a fee for online access, but it's one of the few newspapers that's been able to successfully sell paid subscriptions. The Times, on the other hand, built a large Web presence by making its content available for free -- until September of 2005, when it began charging readers for access to columnists including Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd and Nicholas D. Kristof.
Although the company boasts that almost a quarter of a million readers pay $49.95 a year for the service, it's been apparent for a while that some executives at the Times don't favor the initiative. Speaking at an industry summit in February, Nicholas Ascheim, the company's director of entertainment, video and audio products, said that younger users might never read the paper's columnists if they had to pay for them. "New generations will never get exposed," he said.
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Dana Lipnickas http://www.ewaydirect.com
As a faculty memeber, I get WSJ and NYT for free through my college library, usually a day late. I agree that younger viewers are missing good stuff in WSJ and NYT because of the subscription cost.
I think the WSJ has great content and I doubt Murdoch will change that. As for NYT, it's a shame the liberal left swallows the party line so willingly from Sulzberg. The bias from Sulzberg is far worse than anything Murdoch permits at Fox News. At least citizens can more readily compare the ideological slant of either newspaper (if they can bare to admit that all worldviews are inherently subjective, not objective, even when choosing which facts to report and which to bury).
The fees charge were to pay the people who promoted the subscrition for the publication. The publishers real revenue is from the advertisers. So why is this so complicated other than greed.
I'll be happy to have the access again, but wonder if the damage is already done in terms of whether or not we'll want to read them if we only access The Times online... I suppose that time will tell.