Dept. Of Bad Ideas: NYT.com To Put Blogs Behind Paywall

by Glynnis MacNicol | 1:35 pm, February 26th, 2010

» 4 comments

Normally speaking, I happen to think the NYT is generally a step ahead of the game when it comes to online content, so this is puzzling. I missed it last week, but apparently the NYT.com many blogs are going to be behind the metered paywall the Times is planning on launching next year.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this changed, since when the news broke in a Q&A last week there seemed to be some confusion over the details. But even the fact the NYT.com is considering it seems like a huge misstep. I understand their need to put the paper’s print content behind a paywall (though along with everyone else, I worry it will do some damage to their relevance) but the blogs? That’s just silly. That’s the same sort of thinking that got them into the whole Timeselect debacle. Reuters Felix Salmon was also amazed by the news:

That shocked me: blogs rely on loyal readers who come back to read them often. But few blog readers are loyal enough to pay for the privilege of reading that blog. And if you’re someone who participates regularly in the Freakonomics comments section, for instance, you’re going to be very annoyed if you’re forced to buy a subscription to the entire nytimes.com site in order to do so.

My guess is that if Nisenholtz does this, a lot of the branded blogs on nytimes.com, including both Freakonomics and Paul Krugman, will simply leave and set (back) up on their own. It’s possible that the NYT digital team could quietly exempt those blogs from the meter, but it’s important with any system like this to be transparent about which pages count and which don’t, and carving out exceptions could quickly make things far too complicated to be easily comprehensible.

Of course one of the NYT.com strengths is its ability to roll with the punches and stick with things that are working and drop things that don’t. Also, this paywall is still a ways off, and as I said, I wouldn’t be surprised if it got dropped in the interim. I certainly hope so, anyway.

Felix Salmon, New York Times, NYT.com, The State of Journalism

http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

It all looks kind of murky and nebulous to me.

On one hand, you have the very valid point raised by the NiemanLab piece, which is that people aren’t going to want to waste a “visit” on a short, tossed-off blogpost, but the Times also have a lot of writers stuck in some sort of middle.

For example, their “Media Decoder” blog has several, if not all of its participants, who also write for the main paper/site. So in their cases… what would differentiate between a blogpost and a site article?

Because they wouldn’t want to wait to publish and the Times has historically been good about getting their stuff online ASAP, I’m sure they’re not going to want to wait to see if something makes the print edition to decide how to categorize an article and for that matter, why would every “web-only” be a blogpost?

Would there be some kind of size or quality standard? Would the author or their editors get to decide?

Right now, just thinking about it for the first time, I’d say that without further defining a blogpost and how content for one is different than another (breaking news blogpost – NBC is sold; Full article – Comcast purchases NBC in $x deal), it’s probably easier to just build one fence and due to the issues raised, if some branded content would like to move to a NYTimes owned URL, it’d be an easy workaround.
pola

Bad for them, good for the USA.
http://www.facebook.com/people/David-Sanger/714870579 David Sanger

That just seems not very well thought out. People who rely on RSS feeds will see what? headlines only? nothing?

This seems likely to hur the NYT even more.
J Baustian

They could just limit permission to comment to the paying customers. I suspect there are some people who hate the Times so much, that they would spend 12 hours a day posting harsh comments; heck, I might do some of that myself. But since I would never contribute a dime to keep the Times afloat, their blogs could be preserved as a criticism-free zone behind the paywall.