Sunday, March 13, 2005

E&P on New York Times possibly becoming a for-pay site

As noted on The Laura Flanders Show tonight, there will be a piece in Editor & Publisher on Daniel Okrent. I've given up waiting for it to post.

However, this item from Editor & Publisher deserves noting:

In a lengthy article Monday on newspapers facing questions about the future of free Web content, Katharine Q. Seelye of the The New York Times reveals that her newspaper "has been considering charging for years and is expected to make an announcement soon about its plans.... Executives at The Times have suggested that the paper, which already charges for its crossword puzzle, news alerts and archives online, may start charging for other portions of its content, but would not follow the [Wall Street] Journal model, which charges online readers $79 a year for everything." She added that most other major papers "are watching and waiting as they study the patterns of online readers."
The Washington Post has no current plans to charge, fearing a big drop off in traffic, but "we're always looking at the issue," Caroline Little, publisher of Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive, told Seelye.

I haven't read Seelye's article but I don't see how she "reveals" anything since we've been discussing this for two or three months now. But E&P thinks it's big news so we'll note it here.
From E&P's item, there's nothing that we haven't been discussing since January (December?).

If they do go for pay, we'll note the print edition and leave it at that. A loss in links from around the web will also hurt their "reach." (Somewhere, some devices tracks the number of links articles get online. Ask a computer expert.) (Which wouldn't be me.)