A few days ago, David Weinberger posted about something that’s afoot at the New York Times:
The NYTimes.com site is re-fashioning itself, launching in April. That’s what Robert Larson, director of product management and development of NYTimes.com, told me when I interviewed him for the issue of Release 1.0 that came out last week. (Here’s the article’s first section.) They’re doing something bold and important, which I think may mark a turning point…but perhaps not the one NYTimes.com envisions.
The NY Times famously moves stories from their original links to new ones in the for-pay archive after a week. As a result, important stories exit the public sphere, and the newspaper of record becomes the newspaper of broken links. [See "Note on Links" at end.] So, starting in April, NYTimes.com is going to publish thousands of topic pages, each aggregating the content from the 10 million articles in its archive, going back to 1851, including graphics and multimedia resources. [NOTE: They are not opening their archive. The content will likely be descriptions created for the Times Index; you'll still have to pay to see articles in the archive.] Topics that get their own page might include Boston, Terrorism, Cloning, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Condoleeza Rice. News stories will link to these topic pages. And — the Times must hope — these pages, with their big fat permanent addresses, may start rising in Google’s rankings.
Let’s call a spade a spade – these topic archives aren’t about adding value to individual NYT news stories, but rather are about marketing those stories to more targeted audiences. Not to join the legions of bloggers lining up to gripe about this, but man oh man is this not what they need to do to stay relevant in the digital age. I’m sure that there’s a ton that I don’t know, and I’m not privy to the economics of newspaper production, but drawing on a lot of time studying the history of media/business as well as my own experience working at washingtonpost.com in the heady days of 1998, this seems like a seriously missed opportunity:
- First off, $2.95 is still a hell of a lot to pay for a news story. Consider the fact that $2.95 buys you three songs at the iTunes store; is the labor involved with the production of one news story equivalent to that required to produce three audio tracks? Moreover, the costs of producing those archived news stories have already been covered by a combination of past subscription/newsstand fees and advertisements…the actual costs of providing a NYT story from 1910 lie in the realm of data preservation and migration, and while not insubstantial, I’m dubious about the business model.
- Another point about the price, in the form of a thought experiment: who exactly is going to pay $2.95 for a single news story? It’s not a casual reader, by any means…the NYT is betting that there will be people who either don’t care about the expense, or who need a given story enough to shell out. Essentially, this boils their market down to the wealthy (probably with institutional affiliations) or the desperate, and in both cases the buyer in question finds herself in a classic adversarial relationship with the seller. The NYT sees its stories as having a fixed value ($2.95), and isn’t going to part with them for less.
- Enough about the price – here’s my bigger point: there’s nothing new here as regards the NYT’s relationship to the larger information ecosystem. Any new NYT initiative doesn’t come in a vacuum; they’re struggling to remain relevant in a new blog-driven digital culture that is structured to value free and freely-linkable information, while at the same time trying to extract some sort of value from the content they’ve gone to the considerable expense to migrate online. What’s a media company to do?
Easy answer: don’t antagonize your consumers, befriend them. Don’t clutch so tightly to your product – instead, understand that the more an article is linked-to, the more it’s discussed, the more valuable it becomes. Set up systems to encourage linking – permalinks are a good start, but a really radical system would go even further in 4 easy steps:- Drop the price to something that someone will pay without thinking twice – my instinct is somewhere between a dime and a quarter
- Micropayments are still expensive to process, so don’t deal with credit cards on a per-transaction basis; require users to set up accounts funded with an initial deposit of $10, which will automatically replenish from your credit card when you drop below a certain threshold (like my highway EZ-Pass). Make the transaction as invisible and frictionless as possible.
- Create an associates system like the one that drives massive amounts of traffic to Amazon every day; every time someone “buys” an article through a post on my blog, I get a cut of the proceeds. This not only gives bloggers (the early-adopters and mavens of our current digital landscape) incentive to buy into the system, it harnesses their diverse expertise and audiences as marketing for your own articles (think The Long Tail meets James Surowiecki).
- Only allow referral associates to cash out in high enough increments (think $50, for example) that the vast majority will simply leave their relatively meager proceeds in their accounts, using them to buy access to other articles (again, much the way that most bloggers tend to use their Amazon Associates proceeds to buy – you guessed it – more things from Amazon).
It’d be a risky-seeming strategy, but one which would fit with one of the dominant trends in the online world (toward partnering with one’s customers and breaking down the hard-and-fast categories of producer and consumer), and which would go a long, looooong way toward reversing the erosion of the NYT’s stature as a go-to source in the increasingly fragmented online world.
