The New York Times has “announced”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/17/business/media/17times.html?ex=1273982400&en=0b9bad06a1930877&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss that it is moving some of its free web-based content to a subscription plan. The announcement isn’t entirely clear on what will be placed behind the subscription wall, but “charging users an annual fee to read its Op-Ed and news columnists” makes it sound likes it’s going to be an awful lot.
The New York Times currently makes its editorials and news columns available to the public for seven days, after which they are removed and placed in the archives. Articles in the archives can normally be retrieved for a fee. However, the New York Times has a fostered a relationship with the blogging community by allowing the creation of archive-safe links, allowing access to articles without a fee even after seven days have elapsed. This was originally part of a relationship between Userland Software and the New York Times, whereby Userland would provide RSS feeds for the New York Times, and in doing so, would create links that did not expire. The “New York Times Link Generator”:http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink was even created for converting a normal New York Times URI into an archive-safe URI without having to find the link in the RSS feed. You will notice that the archive safe URI include “partner=rssuserland.” Dave Winer, the founder of Userland, “explained”:http://backend.userland.com/2003/06/16#a265 this back in “2003″:http://davenet.scripting.com/2003/06/06/newYorkTimesArchiveAndWeblogs. Dave described the purpose of the policy succinctly:
bq. The Times sees itself as the newspaper of record; it’s only natural that it wants to extend that to the Web where it would like to be the news source of record. However, with a closed archive, and broken links from weblogs, it’s impossible for the Times to achieve that goal.
bq. From the weblog writer’s point of view, even if the Times isn’t always correct, even I don’t always agree with what they say, I do believe that what they say is important. Without constraints, I will point into the Times archive regularly. In the brief period where I thought it wouldn’t work out, I really felt a loss by not having the Times as a full participant in the Web that I write for.
bq. But we did come up with a solution that I think works; a simple way for the Times to maintain its revenue stream from its archive, yet remain open to weblog authors.
The New York Time now appears to be “providing its own feeds”:http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/index.html, and the URIs in those feeds contain “partner=rssnyt.” The effect, however, is the same; links from the RSS feed are archive-safe–at least for the moment. The New York Times has not given any indication of whether this practice will continue post-subscription plan.
The effect of (1) publishing content available to the public and (2) allowing links into the archives without a fee has been, in my opinion, dramatic. Compare the online presence of the New York Times to that of the Wall Street Journal. Leaving aside any potential argument about the relative quality of the two, the New York Times is discussed on a much wider basis than the Wall Street Journal. For example, Technorati “reports”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=nytimes.com that there are 110,477 links to the New York Times from 45,481 sources. However, Technorati “reports”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=wsj.com that there are only 910 links to the Wall Street Journal from 828 sources. Assuming that Technorati’s data is roughly accurate, New York Times articles are linked more than Wall Street Journal articles _by a factor of 100._
The simple volume of discussion isn’t the only difference enabled by publicly available content. Because the New York Times makes its articles public, third parties can create tools like “The Annotated Times”:http://annotatedtimes.blogrunner.com/, a site which, at the moment, is tracking 27,163 articles by 4,461 New York Times authors on 1,732 topics. No similar tool that I am aware of exists to track content from the Wall Street Journal. The differences between the two papers should come as no surprise; virtually all of the Wall Street Journal’s valuable content is inaccessible–kept behind a subscription wall. Adam Penenberg wrote “an article”:http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66697,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_5 on the problems faced by the Wall Street Journal because of its choice of online business model for Wired News. (Ironically, one of the few bits of free content recently offered by the Wall Street Journal was “an article”:http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB111506043055722385-fYFKkcbXGE_gNXy6EdSOomDwSfo_20050602,00.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top on the upcoming New York Times subscription plan.) Now the New York Times wants to adopt that model?
Business Week ran “an article”:http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_03/b3916001_mz001.htm on the future of the New York Times in January of this year, noting the paper’s savvy use of its online resources. Indeed, the article quotes chairman Arthur Sulzberger on the subject:
bq. “Within our lifetimes, the distribution of news and information is going to shift to broadband,” Sulzberger says. “We must enter the broadband world having mastered the three key skill sets–print, Internet, and video–because that’s what’s going to ensure the future of this news organization in the years ahead.”
Within our lifetimes? Try _now_. Anyway, the article also notes that despite the economic troubles faced by the paper, New York Times Digital — which includes “Boston.com”:http://boston.com/ in addition to “NYTimes.com”:http://www.nytimes.com/ — is doing just fine. In fact, the digital unit netted $17.3 million on revenues of $53.1 million during the first half of 2004. The articles estimates that the digital unit will continue to grow at 30% to 40% a year, and that advertising accounts for _almost all of that revenue_. Why on Earth would the New York Times move its digital unit to a subscription-based model, when the advertising-based model has made the digital unit the fastest growing in the company? Indeed, it seems to me that recent experience would counsel just the opposite: the Times should open its digital archives completely, and try and generate additional advertising revenue, rather than risk losing that revenue in an attempt to drive subscriptions up. Maybe Sulzberger doesn’t understand “broadband” as well as he thinks he does.