The New York Times plans to convert the company's web site to a mix of free articles plus some "premium content" available for a fee. "This is a bet, to a certain degree, on where we think the web is going,” said Times chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. in an internal memo sent to employees.
This announcement might not seem important to you, but it certainly got my attention. The New York Times is going through a change that appears to be identical to what this newsletter went through more than five years ago. The new plan developed by the Times appears to be identical to the one I created for this newsletter.
According to an article by Eliot Van Buskirk in the Wired.com web site, "... the Times needs this plan to work — as does, arguably, the rest of the newspaper industry, which has been crushed by debt from financial restructuring, the recession, a weak ad market and intense competition from the same online medium this plan hopes to embrace."
You can read more at http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/new-york-times-plans-to-charge-for-articles/.
Another article at http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/07/new-york-times-considers-5-monthly-web-fee-bloomberg/ claims that the Times will charge $5 a month for its premium content.
