Disappeared News

by Larry Geller

Twitter is, well, all a-twitter as the New York Times announcement of a paywall registers in the cyberconsciousness. This is how we get our news these days, it seems. 140 characters works really well for this. The tweets cascade to a crescendo like those mynah bird trees you walk under in early evening in Honolulu. After the chatter has died down, the dinosaur media get to publish it some time later.

For example, this article appeared precisely 21 minutes ago, and it was already old news on a Twitter scale of things:

The New York Times already announced that it would be implementing a paywall for at least some of its content earlier this year, but now it has a concrete date. The publication is actually reversing course in this area; it previously charged for access to archived and editorial content on its site, a practice that didn’t stop until August 2007.

Joe Strupp from Media Matters for America reached out to Keller about the plans for The New York Times website and how it will impact customers.

    “Those who mainly come to the website via search engines or links from blogs, and those who only come sporadically — in short, the bulk of our traffic — may never be asked to pay at all. People who have print subscriptions will get full website access without charge. So we do not anticipate a major impact on overall traffic, which is important to maintain advertising.”
…
This metered approach is certainly likely to perform better than, say, the all-or-nothing approach (like what Newsday implemented, or rather, tried to implement), but its success may ultimately depend on how much content is protected and what additional incentives The New York Times can offer subscribers.   [Mashable.com, New York Times Paywall Goes Up January 2011, 5/14/2010]

Permalink posted by Larry @ 5/14/2010 10:01:00 AM