For years and years now we’ve had free news sites. CNN, MSNBC, BBC, Le Monde, Telegraph, Times, Der Spiegel and so on. These are nearly household names, and most of us watch the TV versions during a day, BBC, ABC, NBC, you get the gist.
So for many years now I’ve read the Times Online website, it’s one of the best, good articles, some fluff but mostly useful and readable. I heard about this subscription route when they started to talk about it a few years ago; no-one did anything about it, then the NY Times changed a while back. It still has a viewable, readable site though.
Then a month or so ago I heard about the Times changing so it will be subscription only. One of the pundits who wrote about it said the Times would drop from 1.5 million readers online to something like 150,000, which I could believe.
I don’t believe it’ll work out for them. It just doesn’t seem viable to me, especially in this day and age, to charge for online content, particularly news. How many years have we had free news, and now they change it? How many times have you seen the popups from the MSN messenger with MSNBC news? Or the myriad of toolbars you can clutter your browser up with from news outlets?
Imagine BBC charging for news (although, since I pay the TV licensing fee, you could argue most brits already do), or ABC, NBC, Le Monde (they could do with having a non-french version)?
The Times Online is not the largest news outlet online, it has a good following but I don’t think they’ll convert more than 10%. Then they just become a news magazine, and a mediocre-sized one at that. Pity.
I think one of the questions I ask is this, are they (the whole Times group/organisation) making a loss? If so, are they making a huge one? If they were, I could see their issue and their need to charge. But if this is just something to make yet more money, I have to really question journalism as a whole. I know they’re a business, but journalism has always been a special type of business, making money wasn’t the entire goal, they are/were the conscience of us all, asking questions we daren’t or couldn’t. Now it just seems they’re after our money like any other business.
Tags: subscription, times online
Me too, John. I would love to see some of that rain here.
Isn't it Erie when it rains that hard? I think it's mesmerizing.