 Markos Moulitsas |
 Martin Nisenholtz |
I was shocked when I learned this morning (I was flying yesterday) about Monday’s announcement that the New York Times is placing all of its op-ed columnists behind a $50-a-year pay firewall starting in September. Shocked probably isn’t too strong a term.
Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan castigated the Times for withdrawing from the blogosphere.
Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos — whom I finally had a chance to meet in person today — derided the decision on his blog and in a conversation with me following his talk at IDG Syndicate today.
Markos wrote that come September, he’ll stop linking to the Times Op-Ed pages. “I think this is the best way they can become irrelevant. If my readers can’t read it, why would I link to it? The key to blogging is that readers can look at the source material and make up their own minds.”
Markos told me, “The Times has it exactly backward. Opinion is the one thing that is not in short supply in the blogosphere. David Brooks’s ability to influence the public discourse will be incredibly diminished. The Times is taking itself out of the conversation.”
Count me with Sullivan and Moulitsas. This seems like a wrongheaded decision, perhaps not from an immediate business POV but certainly from a long-term strategic one. It will marginalize the Times’ editorial voice in profound ways.
Ironically, minutes after Markos spoke, Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations for the New York Times Co. (and an affable, familiar figure at media conferences), took the stage.
It wasn’t exactly the lion’s den, but Nisenholtz fielded a barrage of questions about the policy decision, including two from me. Highlights:
– He said the decision generated “very robust discussion inside the company,” with some people arguing for keeping the op-ed columns open on the Web and others arguing for closing off more of the content.
– The decision to include the op-ed columnists behind the firewall, Nisenholtz said, was one based on the idea that they wanted something “powerful enough to attract people and make them want to subscribe but to keep the big front door open” at the same time. One goal of the move, he said, was that “so ultimately we can pay the journalists” on the Website, although I suggested that David Brooks, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman really write for the print publication and thus shouldn’t be counted against the online operation.
– When someone asked if the Times was concerned about being shut out of the conversation, Nisenholtz said, “Yes, there is a fear of that. What I’m hoping is that won’t happen, although there’s the possibility that can happen. I hope over the next several months we will see the hidden paid Web [become more prominent]. It strikes me as odd that you can do a Google search and never find the Wall Street Journal. We think that’s OK. (Laughter.) From a social perspective, that does seem odd to me.”
And yet the Times is now embarking down the same road.
– Nisenholtz: “I don’t know how the search engines accommodate themselves to this. But I have a feeling that as more and more folks struggle with the issue of free and paid that they will have to accommodate themselves because I don’t think it’s necessarily right that the only information that gets exposed is free.”
– I asked Nisenholtz, “I can’t believe that your columnists are happy about this.” He nimbly answered that he wouldn’t presume to speak for the Times’ columnists, but that the columnists have “responded well” so far.
– More Nisenholtz: “For 10 years you’ve been asking for seamless access to the archive, and now we’ve given that to you. The quid pro quo is you got what you asked for and now we’ve got to ask for something in return.”
– What about bloggers who cut and paste from op-ed columns — even entire columns? “I don’t really want to comment too much other than that we will continue to do whatever is necessary to protect our intellectual property,” Nisenholtz said. “We recognize there will be some of that, because of the nature of the blogosphere.”
Let me be clear: No one begrudges the Times’ right to make money from its online operation, but the New York Times Digital is already profitable, and this seems like a move that will hurt the paper’s voice — and, yes, its credibility — in the long run.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Nisenholtz changes paid content model at NYTimes.com
The New York Times announced Monday
that it plans to charge $50/year for a subscription that includes
access to the Op-Ed columns among other things beginning in
September.&…
I could care less about whether Kos links to the Times— why do I need him as another gatekeeper? No doubt the Times has the numbers on the referers to their columns.
But one thing you say grabs me, in the end: “hurt the paper’s voice — and, yes, its credibility.” Whoa. You are equating these two attributes when they shouldn’t be. One has nothing to do with the other. It’s clear that the Times would certainly most rather have credibility than voice (range, influence, etc.).
I’m not sure if the pricing model is perfect, and I myself am curious whether someone who pays $250/year for Sunday delivery will get it included. I would hope so.
In the end, I think any publication’s credibility is hurt when it withdraws from a dialogue with the public — including even the Times.
So while it’s mostly about voice and range and influence, it’s ultimately also about trust. If I don’t read your publication’s columnists because they’re no longer in the public townsquare, they become less accessible, less familiar, and ultimately less trustworthy. If to know me is to trust me, then to not know me is to trust me less.
This is, on the face of it, absurd, and I think dangerous, to peg credibility to voice. Essentially you’re saying that it’s more important to be loud than to be right.
How does your theory account for the scores of periodicals which were never free over the Internet?