[Media]

The NY Times is Right To Charge

The New York Times, beginning next Monday, is gonna charge us to read Krugman. This is, naturally, not a popular decision in the blogosphere (see here for a characteristic critique). The argument tends to go like this: the Times is making a boneheaded mistake in taking hard cash over passive eyeballs. The columnists are the most-read online content, and forcing people to pay to read them will result in far fewer page views, and thus far less ad revenue. (An unspoken criticism, which is the only one that I agree with, is that it sucks for bloggers. Big time. It reduces our community touchstone and may fragment discussion. And, more to the point, cheapskates like me are now going to have to shell out a bone every Monday and Friday.)

Let's take the ad argument first. I'm not at all convinced that to advertisers more is better. Mags like the New Yorker command premium ad prices not (only) because of their circulation size, but the size of the readers' wallets. Advertisers may well prefer a smaller pool of subscribers--they have a much clearer, targeted demographic to shoot for there (cheapskates like me are weeded out). And keep in mind: the Times plans to keep news content free. They'll still get cheapskates, but they'll also get a coveted demographic with subscription. Because they'll still offer free content, they should remain a key player in the blogosphere.

But that's not why this is a good decision. The far more important calculation is how dead-tree media keep themselves afloat. Newspapers are an ancient medium. They survived radio and television, but the internet may do them in. The greatest advantage newspapers had over other media is that they were immediate and local. Newspapers functioned as an information nexus for communities, providing news, ads relevant to shopping, and classifieds (for jobs, houses, sales). Neither radio nor TV could offer that kind of comprehensive function, and so newspapers survived--but the internet is a new beast. It can offer everything the newspapers did, but more comprehensively and more quickly.

The only way a newspaper can survive as a medium is to offer something new. The Times, in thinking about how to remain relevant, has come up with this plan to charge for exclusive content (columnists) and then give subscribers additional exclusive content (multimedia, access to the archives). They believe this is a unique function and one people will pay for. Who knows? We're on the new frontier here.

The one thing we do know is that if newspapers don't try something different, their circulations will die off with their readers, and then we'll all be reading blogs and watching FOX. This will be an interesting experiment, and everyone in the country will be watching to see how it turns out.