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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged paywalls

1. March 17, 2011 05:40 PM

   “Information Wants to Be Free”; The NYT Does Not

   Paywall reactions and misunderstandings

   By Lauren Kirchner

   The New York Times has announced that its metered paywall will go into effect on March 28, costing readers $15 per month to read more than twenty articles in a month’s time, with the price going up a bit for the use of the Times mobile application. On day one, at least, opinion on the web seems widely negative—although, perhaps...

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2. March 17, 2011 11:50 AM

   NYT Announces Paywall Details, In Effect March 28

   By Lauren Kirchner

   After months of speculation and anticipation from all sides of the industry, The New York Times revealed Thursday morning the details of its website paywall, which will be erected for US readers on Monday, March 28 (for Canadian readers, it goes into effect immediately). The magic number? $15. From Jeremy Peters: Beginning March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will be able...

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3. November 26, 2012 10:00 AM

   The Washington Post needs a paywall—now

   A strategic error needs to be reversed, stat

   By Dean Starkman

   The not-so-gentle ejection of Marcus Brauchli from the top editor’s chair at The Washington Post has cast a bright spotlight now on senior leadership, including his boss, Katharine Weymouth, the newspaper’s publisher, who pushed him aside, and her uncle, Donald Graham, chairman of the parent company’s board. That the editorial change was awkwardly implemented is one thing. But much...

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4. February 14, 2012 01:44 PM

   A National Paywall That Works

   Lessons from Slovakia

   By William F. Baker

   While nobody was looking, a small company in Slovakia may have shed some light on one of the biggest challenges to the news business in the digital age: how to get people to pay for news online. Piano Media, launched in Bratislava last spring, gives subscribers single-login online access to content from all nine of Slovakia’s leading news publishers, for...

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5. May 16, 2011 08:25 PM

   Audit Notes: WSJ on Selling Access, Wall Street-Style; Yanked; Small Paywalls

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal has a very good page-one story on how Wall Street gives hedge funds access to key executives in exchange for their business. The lede is great: One day in early March, the phone lines of hedge-fund traders around London and New York suddenly lit up. A stock that many of them had placed hefty bets on—Pride...

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6. April 4, 2011 08:26 PM

   Audit Notes: Hiltzik on Drug R&D, A 1 Percent “Score”, Paywalls

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Los Angeles Times's Michael Hiltzik finds a study that questions the drug lobby's line on how much it costs to develop medicines: The statistic that may be most hazardous to your health is one pegging the research and development cost of bringing a new drug to market at $1.3 billion. Its purveyor is the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of...

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7. July 29, 2011 07:40 PM

   Audit Notes: What News Corp. Knew, Mulcaire Talks, FT Paywall Success

   By Ryan Chittum

   The New York Times has a big scoop tonight on the Murdoch hacking scandal, reporting that News International and its law firm knew back in 2007 that News of the World had bribed the police—and proceeded to cover it up. Both Harbottle & Lewis and News International took notice of the e-mails to and from Mr. Goodman containing those initial...

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8. July 30, 2012 12:06 PM

   Digital goes first at the FT (Updated)

   The Financial Times now has more digital subscribers than print ones; running the numbers

   By Dean Starkman

   Like them or not, newspaper paywalls continue better-than-expected performances, the latest good (for some of us) news coming from The New York Times Company and Pearson’s Financial Times. Digital subscribers to The New York Times and its sister paper, The International Herald Tribune surpassed the half-million mark, way ahead of the most optimistic projections. At 509,000, it’s up 12 percent...

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9. June 5, 2012 11:36 AM

   How David Simon is wrong about paywalls

   Let me count the ways. Ten, in fact.

   By Howard Owens

   David Simon is a talented writer and storyteller, but is he qualified to give advice to publishers about how to save their dying industry? As qualified as anybody else, I suppose. But when he suggested in a recent piece for CJR that people like me who disagree with his position on paid content were unqualified, that got under my skin...

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10. September 12, 2012 06:50 AM

    Journal Register opens the kimono a bit

    CEO John Paton gives us some hard numbers

    By Ryan Chittum

    One of my biggest criticisms of Journal Register Company and Digital First Media has been how it has cherry-picked financial figures to show its transformation is succeeding, and how the press covered those incomplete numbers. Journal Register, as a closely held company owned by a secretive hedge fund, doesn't have to report its results. So it's been near impossible for...

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11. September 6, 2012 12:05 PM

    Journal Register, future-of-news star, is bankrupt again

    Takeaways for the newspaper business

    By Ryan Chittum

    Yesterday, John Paton announced that Journal Register Company is filing for bankruptcy for the second time in three years. That’s something of a surprise to people who've read his announcements of soaring digital revenues and profits credulously. JRC’s (latest) bankruptcy declaration is not good news to an already demoralized news business. But it’s an occasion to rethink old assumptions about...

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12. November 15, 2012 06:50 AM

    Marcus Brauchli’s impossible task

    The Post's ultimate problem is the business side, not the newsroom

    By Ryan Chittum

    I can't think of any editor whose last few years ran headlong into the financial collapse of the newspaper industry more than Marcus Brauchli's. Brauchli got the top job at The Wall Street Journal hours after learning that Rupert Murdoch had made the Bancroft family an offer they couldn't refuse. That hapless bunch presided over the unlikely fall of the...

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13. January 23, 2012 05:30 PM

    Patent Trolls 4 News Paywalls

    Nathan Myhrvold makes some common errors about the newspaper industry

    By Ryan Chittum

    As far as voices of support go, the news business probably wishes it could do better than a patent troll . But I suppose it'll take what it can get these days. Unfortunately, Nathan Myhrvold, writing for Bloomberg View, gets a couple of pretty big things wrong in describing the woes of the newspaper business. For instance, in discussing them,...

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14. April 5, 2011 01:05 PM

    Paywall Postscript

    What have your experiences of the NYT paywall been?

    By The Editors

    The New York Times’s metered paywall has been in effect since March 28, and reactions to the plan have varied from relief to rage. (Our favorite take had to be The Onion headine, “NYTimes.com's Plan To Charge People Money For Consuming Goods, Services Called Bold Business Move.”) As it happens, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism will be hosting a...

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15. November 7, 2012 11:02 AM

    Paywalls are a means, not an end

    A Toronto Star columnist's belligerence gets me thinking

    By Dean Starkman

    I like paywalls. I really do. I think it makes sense for newspapers that saw the bottom drop out of print ad revenue to now ask readers to pick up a greater share of the cost of news. And it’s a win-win-win-(ok, -lose) deal, since paywalls haven’t cost papers much in the way of online traffic or digital ad...

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16. March 16, 2011 12:40 PM

    Should News Paywalls Demand Less in Poorer Countries?

    The case for variable pricing

    By Justin D. Martin

    CAIRO—Consumers have made peace with the fact that some things cost more in certain places. A cup of black coffee at a Cairo McDonald’s costs less than the same stimulant at a McDonald’s in Manhattan. A night at the Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus costs $445, while in Maui it’ll set you back nearly $1,000. I wonder, then, whether online...

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17. November 22, 2010 02:30 PM

    The Daily for iPad is On Its Way

    Rupert Murdoch skips the web, goes straight for the store

    By Lauren Kirchner

    Women’s Wear Daily broke the news last week that NewsCorp’s iPad “newspaper,” the Daily, will launch next month in a beta version, with a wider launch set for early 2011. We don’t know that much more than we did over the summer when rumors about Murdoch’s latest pet project first started circulating. That is, we know about the staff hires,...

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18. March 17, 2011 12:32 PM

    The New York Times Paywall Looks Good

    Leaky enough to preserve traffic and ads, but strong enough to add incremental revenue

    By Ryan Chittum

    The New York Times paywall is here, and it's about time. Don't ask me why it took so long and why it cost $40 million to build, the point is after a decade and a half of giving away its expensive journalism online, the Times is saying it's worth something: Pay us, please. The straw man argument against paywalls has...

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19. January 18, 2011 11:10 AM

    The NYT Tosses Off a Paywall Story

    By Ryan Chittum

    The New York Times has a brief report today raising hopes about the prospects of a pay model for newspapers. Unfortunately, the story is so thin it probably wasn't worth publishing. The paper relies on data by Journalism Online, Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz's company, whose business is convincing papers to use their services to install paywalls, about the supposed...

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20. October 26, 2012 12:12 PM

    The paywall prevents a deeper downturn at the NYT

    Digital subs keep a weak earnings report from turning into a disastrous one

    By Ryan Chittum

    New York Times Company shares plummeted Thursday as ad revenues were worse than expected, pushing down profits from a year ago. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Times’s paywall continues to be a huge success, and a timely one that's preventing a steep downturn at the company. The NYT/International Herald Tribune added 57,000 digital subscribers in...

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