The NYT paywall is generous to subscribers and non-subscribers alike, and the NYT has managed to keep both goodwill and traffic with respect to its non-subscribers. That can’t be said of the WSJ and FT, who take a much more hostile and adversarial approach to the people who aren’t paying them hard cash. The NYT sees value in remaining accessible to everybody; the FT and WSJ see value in restricting access only to paid subscribers.
Which is why I think it’s fundamentally misconceived to think of the FT paywall as being very similar to the NYT paywall. Rather, it’s at heart the same as the WSJ paywall: a way of restricting content as much as possible to subscribers exclusively. The NYT is a free website with a mechanism for getting readers to subscribe; the FT and WSJ are subscription websites with some content available for free. It’s the NYT model which I love, not what’s going on at the FT.
Felix, Your report is sound to the extent that it is. But it is not on a fairly fundamental issue: the weakness of both the Sunday NYT and the Saturday FT this week. It staggered me reading the feeble-minded column on rating agencies in the weekend FT, about the only effort in it worth looking at. Askance.
Despite the fact that I find The NYT Public Editor to be far and away the best ombuds in the English-language press, I do not like the uneven nature of The NYT. It is like The New Yorker: some overpoweringly good coverage, dominated by acres of mediocrity. Meaning that often you will see an entire issue of the paper with virtually nothing in it, as in yesterday's.
Except for the Murdoch Sunday Times, having a subtle force probably not susceptible to analysis, the major weekend papers are under-performing ones. Murdoch apparently was excited by Review in the weekend WSJ, but it is tedious. The same inept columnists going around in tight little circles. Why doesn't he commission hard news book reviews? The Waste Land would be an excellent subject, with its iPad app and Yale annotations. How is this text being taught at Columbia and Harvard? What does it tell us about The Fever Land we inhabit?
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Mon 15 Aug 2011 at 03:12 PM
Felix: The subtext is what we need to understand. I agree with you that The NYT is treating its readers well. What we have to master is how to hard-wire information collation into university studies (going back to high school), including in journalism schools. Here is a brilliant example:
Whither the M&A scoop? Felix Salmon AUG 15, 2011 09:04 EDT
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AUG 15, 2011 10:38 AM EDT
Yeah, but this is going to blow your mind…unwiredview.com’s Staska actually predicted this very possibility last Thursday:http://goo.gl/SZSP8
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Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 August 2011 13.07 BST
We have to make the foundation firm: in the COBUILD English Grammar, there is an excellent introduction to cohesion. This book should be the official American grammar. It should be official for CJR. Why can't we get this work done?
#2 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Mon 15 Aug 2011 at 03:36 PM
As a suggestion for CJR/Audit housekeeping, it might have been mentioned that the post prior to this one ran late last week over on the Reuters blog where it so happens there was some fairly verbose commenting on the NYT paywall.
It's also curious that in the comparisons of the WSJ and FT hard paywalls to the NYT soft paywall, there is no mention of the fact that both the WSJ and FT are primarily financial publications which put them in something of an apples position to that of the NYT orange. A more direct guage might have been that of the NYT to the Times of London or News Corp's other tablet-based effort The Daily. I'm pointing this out because what seems to be going on in the realm of paywalls is that specialized publications such as financials seem to be a better prospect for a paywall than general news. Another seeming vertical, although to a somewhat lesser extent, is sports.
Yet another factor missing is that in the run-up to the NYT's paywall launch there was some discussion about the impact on core readership. If memory serves, available industry-wide studies at the time were showing rough numbers indicating that less than 20 percent of readers were generating more than 80 percent of page views. What the NYT's metered approach meant was that those who were most likely to generate the most ad revenue were also the ones who would need to pay for a subscription. It was a counter-intuitive idea.
#3 Posted by Perry Gaskill, CJR on Mon 15 Aug 2011 at 04:58 PM
Hi Perry.
It could probably be more visible, but we mention in Felix's bio up top that his stuff also runs on Reuters.com. This way we don't have to keep remembering to add it to his posts.
#4 Posted by Dean Starkman, CJR on Mon 15 Aug 2011 at 05:26 PM