As a native Long Islander, I was amused when Newsday, our local paper, waded fearlessly and without irony into the ice-cold waters of charging for news on the internet.

I don’t know anyone who has ever paid for a physical copy of Newsday. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I thought they were passed out free on the Long Island Railroad until I was about eighteen. Even in high school, in a year full of stoners, everyone was totally too good for Newsday and favored the New York Times when they could afford it. Still, Newsday felt they would be able to charge for access to their poorly designed and annoying to navigating site, done in dark blue with white print- and not at a bargain rate, either.

Back in October, Newsday decided to charge $5 a week (a week!), or $260 a year for access to news about the Hamptons and Massapequa. And how many people do you think availed themselves of that fantastic offer? 10,000? 1,000? 100? Try 35. Not 35,000, 3,500 or 350. 35 people were interested in paying for access to Newsday content. That’s like, not even half of a single car on a rush hour train from Babylon to Penn Station. Fail.

In fairness to Newsday, a large portion of Long Island has access to the paper without having to pay the online fee. 75% of Long Islanders have either a subscription to Newsday itself, or subscribe to Cablevision/Optimum and are comped access to the site. But that figure of 75% has not been broken down into paper subscribers versus those who get freebies with cable, and most telling is the fact that traffic has dropped significantly since the paywall went up:

According to Nielsen Online, traffic has fallen since the paywall went up. In October, the web site had 2.2 million unique users. After the paywall went up that total fell to 1.7 million and 1.5 million in November and December, respectively.

While I like to mock the very public failure of my very local newspaper, the numbers are a cautionary tale to others who think a pay-for access model (and a ballsy one at that) is going to work any differently in this market. Newsday will continue to hemorrhage funds (the site redesign ahead of the paywall cost $4m) until they realize no one on the internet is going to pay for content they can get for free elsewhere. Unless you’ve got something very unique with a completely dedicated base of readers, it will fail. Spectacularly.

[Observer via Gawker]

So, Newsday, how’s that paywall working out for you? is a post from: The Inquisitr

The New York Times has announced that their services will go behind a paywall, however their “pay to read” model won’t go into effect until 2011. They’ve also announced that the system will include a “metered model” which will allow users to read a certain number of articles each month before any charges will be required.

New York Times Chairmen Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. voices his confidence in the companies new approach, stating:

“Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times’ extraordinary, professional journalism. Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”

Given the reputation of the New York Times they may just be able to pull off the multiple level model by providing users with access to various stories and then hooking them into a pay based model, although only time can tell if this oft-failed attempt can actually succeed.

The Times have also reported that exact details about the plans payment structure will be revealed over the next few months, which leads me to believe that specifics are still being worked out.

While the move may help the New York Times gain money from paid subscriptions, it will also more than likely kill their web authority among bloggers and other forms of new media. As Mashable’s Stan Schroeder points out, no website will want to link to an article only to get complaints from readers that their link doesn’t work, which could occur if that reader has read too many NYT articles in any given month.

With other companies, including Hollywood insider Variety going live with their own pay based models, at least the folks at the NYT will have time to determine what works and what doesn’t. If history repeats itself however, it could be a long and bumpy road for their new model.

New York Times Will Implement “Metered” Paywall In 2011 is a post from: The Inquisitr

Expected at some point during the next couple of weeks is the announcement by Arthur Sulzberger Jr, Chairman of New York Times, that the illustrious Gray Lady well be retreating to her petticoats of a paywall. As a side note there have been a few who have noted that this is around the same time that Apple is suppose to be unleashing its tablet computer.

While the announcement might come as soon as a couple of weeks chances are that it will take a couple of months for the change over to actually take place. During that time you can be sure that the freetards and other interested parties will be be raising their unified voices in opposition to the idea. Of course there will be dire warnings of failure and thousands of words will be written prognosticating how long it will be before NYT comes to its senses and tears down the wall.

It’s not like NYT hasn’t been down this road before as noted by Gabriel Sherman at NY Magazine’s Daily Intel blog

What makes the decision so agonizing for Sulzberger is that it involves not just business considerations, but ultimately a self-assessment of just what Times journalism is worth to the world. This fall, Keller told the Observer that at some point, the decision is a “gut call about what we think the audience will accept.” Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times’ last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East.

“As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”

With this move the New York Times will be joining other online newspaper operations like The Financial Times as well as the rumored widening move by News Corp to switch its news properties on the web to a paywall access.

In many cases though this move is and will prove disastrous for an increasing number of organizations that retreat to behind a paywall because they are under the illusion that news is finite product. The problem is that the web has proven this to be a totally wrong assumption.

News isn’t finite. It is a constantly evolving and flowing stream of information that anyone can tap into and report and express opinions on. Wherever you turn on the web someone, somewhere is either reporting late breaking news or trying to provide thoughtful commentary.

What there is though is a finite resource of recognizable and brandable names, either individuals or organizations, that bring global eyeballs to the table. It is these people that are really the strength of any news organization as it is their journalistic reputations and editorial opinions that are sought by the person on the street.

It is the ability to create a niche market within a global market of news that is flooded with everyone wanting to have their say that is the real testing ground of whether the paywall method will work. It has worked for The Financial Times precisely because they have voices that people are willing to pay to listen to. However The Financial Times is a rarity of success as a paywall example as they have a recognizable brand that people have always been willing to pay a premium for so extending that to the web really wasn’t that much of a stretch.

Will the same thing work in favor of The New York Times?

Personally I think it does have a shot at working. The New York Times is an iconic brand that is known around the world. While its reputation has taken a bit of a battering over the last few years it still is considered to be one of those few “world class newspapers”. It might not have the same type of niche appeal as the Financial Times but even within the broader landscape of global news brands it is one that people are willing to pay for.

It’s going to be a risky move no doubt but if done right it could work for them. That said though it isn’t something that is going to work for other news organizations. The reason being that regardless of how important they might think they are in the eyes of the Web they are just another news outlet among hundreds of other outlets.

The Web is global in nature and increasingly the news is being separated into two types – global and hyper-local, anything in between is just news that anyone is capable of reporting or opining on. The thinking that by moving these run-of-the-mill news outlets behind a paywall is going to save them is flawed at its core.

The only thing it will result in is – in the words of  Tom Friedman: “I used to read you before you went behind the wall.”

The New York Times to retreat behind a paywall is a post from: The Inquisitr

The New York Times has added a San Francisco Bay Area metro report to its Northern California editions on Fridays and Sundays.

The new addition to the paper went into effect Friday, Oct. 16 and includes content written by New York Times staff as well as other local contributors. The Times already had a staff of 10 people in the bay area who, along with contributors, will write about public affairs and local lifestyle.

In the past, the Times had shown an interest in partnering with local news organizations and building a cooperative news outlet. Warren Hellman’s Bay Area News Project was one of those organizations said to be considering a partnership.

From Mediabistro:

“At a time when so many news organizations are in a forced retreat, it’s exciting to be part of a venture that has set out to build more and better news coverage,” said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, in the official release. “And as someone who grew up in the Bay Area, I’m proud that we can play a role in enriching the quality of reporting about the region.”

New York Times Goes Hyper-Local With Weekend Bay Area Edition is a post from: The Inquisitr

According to Steven Musil at cnet Security The New York Times is in the midst of a battle to get rid of a what they are terming “an unauthorized advertisement”.

In typical fashion the ad warns readers that their computer could be infected with some sort of virus and then redirects the reader to a site offering “antivirus software”. The site readers are being redirected to is best-virus03.com and is a hijacking site that takes over your browser and will attempt to install software.

As one cnet reader told Musil

One CNET reader described how the pop-up ad essentially hijacked his browser, preventing him from navigating away from the site.

"They took me to an ‘antivirus site,’ which kept attempting to scan my computer and install software. Using the back button kept reloading the virus page," the reader said. "It was not possible to close the page, necessitating a force quit."

At this point other than a short blurb in the newspaper’s Media & Advertising section NYT isn’t saying a whole hellva lot.

Rogue ad battle at New York Times is a post from: The Inquisitr

Newspapers as they move away from the print world and try to embrace the online distribution of news are being faced with how they are going to make money. Advertising might work for blogs and other small news oriented endeavors but when it comes to the size of operations like The New York Times advertising supported distribution isn’t going to cut it.

Even at the peak of advertising on the web some would argue that there wouldn’t be enough income from ads to keep the newspaper running the same way it has been. Now that we are in an advertising slump it is even harder to pay the bills, let alone make a profit. So the folks at NYT has been floating a survey asking if people would be willing to pay $5.00 a month to access the NYT’s website.

As Hamilton Nolan at Gawker pointed out – if all 650,000 print subscribers paid this $5 a month NYT would see an instant influx of $39 million per year. Now as nice as that kind of money would be the chances of even getting close to that is next to nil. The fact is that as iconic as the New York Times might be in this day and age of news coming at us a mile a minute from more places than you can shake a stick at there is nothing special about NYT that would justify paying a per month fee.

The reality is that very few news organizations will ever be able to get away with charging any kind of subscription fee. Where the news in the past was made available by those with the money to invest in things like printing presses and vast distribution chains that is no longer the case. Today news distribution is a zero sum game where anyone can distribute both broad ranging news and niche news.

Does this mean that organizations like the New York Times can’t survive in a zero cost distribution world? Definitely not. The problem is that they are still trying to mold old world practices into a new world of news instead of using their brand and immense database of news to create a new organization that can live – and profit in the new world of news.

The inevitable? New York Times floats $5 per month access is a post from: The Inquisitr

Clark Hoyt, the public editor over at the New York Times web site published an article on Saturday, June 20 that I’m having a few problems with. Well, I guess using the word ‘article’ would be a bit of a stretch, since it’s just an unbalanced advertorial that is not clearly marked as an ad.

At the beginning of the article, Hoyt pulls no punches. He talks of how the newsstand price of the NYT went up significantly while the size of the paper and some of it’s coverage decreased. He quotes concerned readers showing their dismay at the publication’s pay-more-for-less changes, then goes on to reassure readers that this is a good thing, that quality will actually increase and that readers will get used to it.

Then comes the current financial situation facing all newspapers and how the last uncharged-for content is fully accessable online to anyone with a web enabled device. That’s where they will turn to next. Hey, if people are going online and reading the NYT for free, we want their money and we’ll put up a paywall to get it.

And, you’ll be getting prime online multimedia content because they’ve had to hire and train an army of videographers who’ll have tons of the latest news up, that you’ll only be able to see online, after paying.

But Hoyt does it with finesse. He can write, I’ll give him that.

Page 2 is where he drops the real bomb, though, with this:

Times executives are studying possible ways to charge readers for online content, an increasing focus in the industry as the world moves to the Web.

Which, if you noticed, drops the bomb first and cleans up after it in the second part of the same sentence by trying to justify the price increase. Everybody else is doing it so we are too.

He then spends the rest of the article using the classic sales copy tactic of having everyday readers just like you sell the new price increases with testimonials, conveniently filling in information between them to put the story in perspective.

NYT readers, they’re going to be charging you for online content, because everyone else is doing it, and you’re going to like it, because everyone else likes it.

The article is just too much. It’s thinly veiled advertising that should be marked as such. In fact, the only things that differentiate it from one of those direct marketing minisite letters is that it doesn’t have a huge red headline, or a big BUY NOW! button at the end… yet.

NYT Grooms Readers for Impending Paywall, with Unmarked Advertorials is a post from: The Inquisitr

The New York Times Company has suspended quarterly dividends due to difficult market conditions.

The move followed a cut from 23c a share to 6c a share in November 2008.

NY Times Co Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. said in a statement that

“Today’s decision provides the Company with additional financial flexibility given the current economic environment and the uncertain business outlook. We have taken decisive steps to reduce capital spending, lower operating costs and re-evaluate our assets. Last month we announced a private financing transaction for $250 million in senior unsecured notes and warrants. We also recently announced that we are exploring the possible sale of our ownership interest in New England Sports Ventures, LLC. We expect the suspension of the dividend, coupled with our other actions, will help us decrease debt and improve the liquidity of the Company, a difficult but prudent measure in this operating environment.”

Shares in the company (NYSE:NYT) traded up 1.63% in after marketing trading after being down 5.39% for the day prior to the announcement being made.

The move isn’t surprising, and does reinforce the difficult situation both the Times, and the broader industry is in.

New York Times suspends dividends is a post from: The Inquisitr