You get what you pay for
The start of the global recession exaggerated, but didn't cause, a concurrent collapse in advertising revenues. That was more a product of belief among many advertisers that they can communicate with their end-users more cheaply via a combination of PR, viral marketing and social media.
At the same time, where the market was previously happy to pay for their newspapers and magazines, people now expect to get all their online content for free. Mainstream media is in crisis and it's all the Internet's fault.
Professional journalists still deliver much higher quality content than the legions of occasional online writers, but the challenge is finding a business model that enables them to extract revenue from that quality. Increasingly, that's looking like good-old subscriptions.
Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch has been stamping his feet on this matter for a while and, unless you access them via Google News, you have to pay to read articles on wsj.com. The UK's equivalent publication - ft.com - lets you see a few pieces before it too asks you to dip your hand into your pocket. Now nytimes.com is preparing to go the same way.
The move has been rumoured for a few days, but a (free to access) story on the site today confirmed it. "This announcement allows us to begin the thought process that's going to answer so many of the questions that we all care about," said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of the NY Times, in the piece. "We can't get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right."
It looks like the nytimes.com will adopt the FT model, but not until 2011. Among the challenges to making this model work will be tackling the ability to get around pay-walls via Google News. "There's a lot of technical work that we need to do over the next year to get this right," said Martin A. Nisenholtz, the SVP for digital operations.
