As I read about the New York Times’ decision to build pay-walls and start charging for its content in 2011, I couldn’t help but laugh a little. The newspaper is making plans for 2011? No rush, I guess.
Come on, guys, there are even predictions that the world will end in 2012. The debate about a sustainable business model for journalism is happening now, not in the future. Shouldn’t we just go ahead with our decisions even if sometimes we have to accept failed experiments?
It was only today that the brilliance of the Times’ announcement hit me—the company just engaged its competitors, the blogosphere and the social mediasphere in a conversation about its business model.
Today Google offered 105,000 results for the keyword phrase “ny times paywall.” Some of the posts, I am sure, are only remotely relevant to the topic at hand, but one could also try other keyword combinations. What I am trying to say is that people have been actively discussing the Times’ decision.
What is more, the online community has been pointing out loopholes in the pay-wall plan. Some of the smartest financial analysts and technology writers spent their time addressing problematic issues in the revised business model. To list a couple that impressed me the most, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher published a post titled A Massive Hole in New York Times’ Paywall Plan and finance blogger Felix Salmon wrote a series of articles about the paywalls.
In a way, the Times hired an army of thought leaders to help them out in making an important decision. How smart is that?
Photo credit: paalia
yay for marketing & advertising!
I’m afraid I don’t think Tom Foremski has thought about this very hard.
I was unaware of the Times’ decision to let links be free, and that certainly does raise some questions about the metered system that need to be addressed, but there are is an even more massive hole in Forenski’s analysis:
“Bloggers that don’t agree to adtribution would be risking legal action, and, they would be seen by their readers as parasites on the work of others.”
Have we forgotten about fair use? If it were possible to legally force blogs to stop quoting and linking, wouldn’t all the media companies that are railing against the “theft” of their content (like the AP and News Corp) be doing that now?
Well, they aren’t. Because journalists regularly invoke fair use in their line of work – in fact, the whole industry depends on it. See: http://techdirt.com/articles/20100108/1446417680.shtml for an example. For all their bluster about blogs “stealing” by quoting, media companies know that what they do is no different: they regularly interview professional analysts and consultants, and quote them liberally in articles. They quote short excerpts from interviews in other publications, or use television clips for the purpose of commentary.
A company like the Times can not go to court to set precedents against the quoting of their stories – if they did, what would stop the governments of the UK or Canada or other commonwealth (who own crown copyright on all government documents) from charging newspapers to quote budgets and auditor reports? Moreover, fair use exists, and a wise judge wouldn’t set such a precedent anyway.
Now, the latter observation that bloggers would be seen as parasites has more weight, but again one must compare it to what is happening now. Yes, bloggers who mindlessly quote others work and add no value themselves will be seen as parasites. But remember, value can be added in countless forms: analysis, community discussion, navigation, interface, aggregation – all valuable parts of the industry that should not be legally stifled. This is why blogs and aggregators succeed today – and I have no idea how the Times plans to address community sites like Digg and Reddit.
I agree with Foremski that the link-exception represents a massive hole in the plan. But if news websites could succeed in legally forcing blogs to license their content, they would already be doing it. The times paywall doesn’t change that in the slightest.
I realize that my comment about commonwealth countries is slightly misleading, since there “fair use” doesn’t exist (at least not in Canada, or the UK as far as I know) – but rather “fair dealing”, which is significantly more limited. Nonetheless, in the field of news reporting and with regards to the topic at hand, the effects are essentially the same, or at least have been so far.