On NY Times: Closing in on the Tipping Point
RCP:
Was Times Select just a few years before its time? NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller says the paper is having a “deadly serious” discussion about ways to start charging its readers for content.
One of the reasons Times Select failed, of course, is because people could find plenty of free content elsewhere and the vast majority found they could easily live without reading the opinions of Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman and the rest of the Times’s opinion columnists.
Won’t the same thing happen if the Times tries to start charging again for content, whether it’s a subscription fee or even per article micro-fee? The answer is probably yes.
Which is why Tim Rutten of the LA Times argues that the only way for newspapers to reverse the slide and shock web consumers out of the deeply conditioned view that all content on the web should be free, is for the government to grant major media outlets an antitrust exemption. This would allow most of the webs largest content-producing outlets (including the NYT, cable web sites like CNN.com, and others) to work together to impose a set pricing structure for content all at once.
Related Posts:
- TIME: Will Rupert Murdoch Be the Pied Piper of Paid Content?
- The Age: Murdoch aims to charge for News sites within year
- AFP: News Corp tests charge-for-content policy at Sunday Times
- Murdoch: Newspapers must charge online
- Financial Times Editor: News Sites Will Charge Access Within One Year
Tags: bill keller, economy, media, new york times, tim rutton, times select
