The New York Time’s announcement that they will be charging for content beginning 2011 is a long time coming. The decline in advertising revenue is just the catalyst the company needed to justify expanding their now defunct TimesSelect experiment which tried to make money from original commentary.
According to the Question and Answers posted on The Time’s website, many Canadian Globe & Mail readers will continue to be able to access the online articles by virtue of a Sunday only subscription.
To me, as to many others I’m sure, this is a great relief. I supplement my Canadian newspaper reading with daily visits to www.nytimes.com where, in typical web fashion, I switch articles without finishing them, leave interesting articles open on my computer for hours, and add my thoughts to the active comment board community.
I herald The Time’s decision as one that is brave, necessary, and indicative of a new era of digital publishing. Brave because they publicly failed to make a sustainable profit charging for the liberal views of their columnists a few years ago and necessary because journalists and the press serve a great purpose and should be fairly compensated for their work.
I believe The Time’s decision marks the turning of a new page for the Internet, which has so long been synonymous with passive accessibility, to a model that emphasizes the commercial necessity for readers to make a choice.
My unqualified support of The New York Time’s decision and my belief that Internet users need to employ the web less for casual scrolling and more for dedicated reading is marred only by my concern that a reader’s choice to purchase a subscription to The New York Time’s digital edition will come at the expense of another one; namely, our regional papers.
If personal economies dictate purchasing one subscription, are readers more likely to pick the heralded New York Times and scrap together their local news from a medley of subway freebees, public radio, blogs, and televised news? I am not sure.
The free market may order in a new era of digital competition which sees Canadian newspapers fighting bigger, International names for online subscriptions, or, as is my concern, we may see the existence of one less of the Internet’s currently uncapped choices
