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New York Times
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Ready, Set, Go: It’s Time to Pay Up for Online News
18 Mar 2011 by Ann Shannon / 2 Comments
Surely we’ve all seen the news by now: Starting in the U.S. March 28th, The New York Times will start charging for the website and for use of its smartphone and tablet apps. Prices begin at $15 for four weeks of full access to the website and the smart phone app.
In a nutshell, readers who subscribe to the print edition keep free access to the website and apps. Makes sense. Everyone else will be able to view 20 articles a month for free on the website and see the “Top News” section in the apps. Interestingly, readers who are led to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media including Facebook and Twitter will still have access to those articles, even if they’ve reached their monthly reading limit. An unofficial FAQ from paidContent really gets down to the nitty-gritty if you want more.
Why now? News industry analyst Ken Doctor points out that it’s good timing for the Times to do this, with the huge iPad 2 launch, world news at a boiling point, and “a growing sense of the Times’ outsized importance as media chaos multiplies.” Many people don’t want their news from just anywhere; they want it from the Times.
This new model is a lot to digest, especially for PR professionals. We regularly access the Times both in print and online as part of our work. It’s necessary just to keep up with what’s happening and to better understand how to win that coveted Times coverage for clients. PR firms most likely will maintain online and print subscriptions out of necessity. However the new model raises anew the question of which type of coverage to prioritize for a given client, print or online? Will the majority of a client’s desired audience be skipping the print edition in favor of consuming articles from the iPad app instead?
Locally the Boston Globe is moving in the same direction as its parent company, rolling out a paid online subscription model and an iPad app later this year. The print edition Boston Globe and Boston.com will be built out separately to appeal to different target audiences. Get a feel for what’s coming with this beta version.
Perhaps not coincidentally, these new pay models come on the heels of the new “State of the New Media” report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. According to the survey, 46% of people say they get their news online at least three times a week. For the first time, online surpasses newspapers (40%). Another first: more money was spent on online advertising in 2010 than on print newspaper advertising. Online advertising overall grew 13.9% to $25.8 billion in 2010 — over $2 billion more than newspaper print advertising in 2010, based on Newspaper Association of America projections. The revolution has only just begun.
According to Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell of the Project for Excellence in Journalism:
“In a media world where consumers decide what news they want to get and how they want to get it, the future will belong to those who understand the public’s changing behavior and can target content and advertising to snugly fit the interests of each user.”
Do the Times, the Globe and other news organizations understand the public’s changing behavior? We’ll soon find out.
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