Tag: New York Times

Paying for the news

“Recovering Journalist” Mark Potts has a great post on New York Times executives’ decision to get rid of their pay service, TimesSelect.

I’ll confess that my glee over the demise of TimesSelect earlier this week was a bit knee-jerk. For consumers, there’s nothing not to like about free. As a blogger, I like being able to link to all Times content. And since the Times Web site is by far the largest news newspaper site, it may be uniquely suited to the advertiser-only model.

But the Times’ move still doesn’t address the question of how to pay for journalism, especially at news organizations that lack the Times’ cachet. (That is, everybody else.) Even Times executives may not have thought this through completely. Potts writes:

[C]ommitting good journalism is expensive, and so far, there’s no indication that advertising will pay the entire way, especially for premium content from the likes of organizations like the Times. By dropping TimesSelect, the Times is walking away from more than $10 million in annual revenue, and it remains to be seen how quickly the resulting traffic bump — and attendant advertising — can make that up. A blanket statement that “content is now and forever free,” as Jeff Jarvis put it in his triumphant posting is just misguided — and belied by ESPN.com, ConsumerReports.org and Zagat.com, not to mention countless high-end subscription-based information and analysis services that serve professional markets. Oh, and print media are still successfully enjoying a revenue stream from subscriptions, you may have noticed.

Typical news junkies may regularly visit five, 10 or more sites. Given that, I think the subscription model remains impractical. (And thus I still don’t lament the passing of TimesSelect.) But microtransactions of some sort — that is, an account from which some small amount of money, perhaps on the order of less than a penny, would be deducted for every article you read — loom on the horizon as a possible solution of how to pay for the news.

Bill Densmore, the founder of one such system known as Clickshare, has further thoughts here.

Free the Times!

TimesSelect is dead. Mickey Kaus explains why he’s glad (actually, he throws a bunch of gibberish on the screen, but you’ll get the idea), and Dan Gillmor explains why it’s smart.

I don’t blame publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. for trying to get readers to pay for content. Nevertheless, the number of potential readers who were shut out had to be enormous. As Web advertising continues to grow, it makes sense for the Times to return to the wide-open Net.

Indeed, Sulzberger and company’s decision to open some of the Times’ archives shows that they’ve decided to embrace the future and figure out later how to pay for it. This is the right thing to do, and I hope this proves to be a risk that pays off. If it does, it will change the entire business for the better.

More alleged news

Would the New York Times Co. please, please, please sell its 17 percent stake in the Red Sox? Then, when the Boston Globe publishes a press release like this on the front of the business section, we can attribute it to simple bad news judgment rather than more nefarious motives. Good grief.

Oh, yeah, and this one too — although I suppose it actually qualifies as news.

Update: Boston Daily beat me to it.

Policing the fashion police

Guy Trebay’s story in the Sunday New York Times on how the presidential candidates dress was intended as a bit of Style-section fluff. It is, unfortunately, a mess, botched both by Trebay and his editors. Consider:

  • We are told that John McCain has been made sport of for wearing a “so-called ‘gay sweater,’ a V-neck worn over a T-shirt.” Well, maybe he has, but the accompanying photo shows McCain wearing a V-neck sweater over a shirt with a collar. How gay is that? Media Nation has no idea.
  • Trebay informs us of the dangers that lurk for candidates who take their wardrobe too seriously: “They risk becoming Al Gore in earth tones, … to cite a famously lampooned misstep the former presidential candidate undertook on the advice of Naomi Wolf, then his image consultant.” Well, now. If there’s a piece of campaign mythology that’s been debunked more thoroughly than that one, I’m not aware of it. Here’s the Daily Howler on the Gore-Wolf matter.
  • Just two sentences later, Trebay writes: “They risk John Kerry’s damaging decision to turn up on television tinted the tangerine hue of a Mystic Tan.” Uh, no. That was Gore, in the first debate in 2000. [Note: See correction, below.]
  • In a reference to Hillary Clinton, Trebay writes that “National Review contributor Myrna Blyth recently characterized [her] as Hairband Hillary, the first lady whose unsteady self-image led to frequent coiffure changes and endearing wardrobe missteps.” I could find absolutely no reference to “Hairband Hillary,” either on Google or LexisNexis. But I did find this, from Blyth’s blog: “Don’t forget that, when she was First Lady, Hillary used to change the way she did her hair every 20 minutes or so. A new look for every presidential crisis, major or minor. Remember the hair band, the flip, the long-gone shoulder-sweeping curls?”

Close enough? Maybe; Trebay didn’t actually put Hairband Hillary in quotation marks. And perhaps the phrase is out there somewhere, even though I couldn’t find it. But what are we to make of the cutline? “READ MY PANTSUIT Hillary Clinton eschews power suits. Railbirds note that she has also lost her trademark hairband.” Her “trademark hairband”? I’m pretty sure Clinton hasn’t worn a headband since the 1992 campaign.

Even froth is unsatisfying when it’s riddled with errors.

And, oh yeah, what’s with the “railbird” reference?

Correction: Oh, there’s nothing I like more than having to correct an item in which I make fun of others’ errors. But it has to be done. There was something about John Kerry’s orange tan during the 2004 campaign, and I had completely forgotten it. See this. Not that it’s any excuse, but the incident was not nearly as well-known as Al Gore’s orange appearance in 2000.

Update: You will not be surprised to learn that former Globe fiction writer Mike Barnicle thoroughly screwed up the “earth tones” thing while filling in on “Hardball” last week, and that he refused to be corrected by Wolf herself. The Daily Howler reports.

Hoyt gets results

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, writing on Sunday:

Susan Chira, the foreign editor, … acknowledged that the paper had used “excessive shorthand” when referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. “We’ve been sloppy,” she said. She and other editors started worrying about it, Chira said, when the American military began an operation in mid-June against what it said were strongholds of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

On Thursday, she and her deputy, Ethan Bronner, circulated a memo with guidelines on how to distinguish Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.

New York Times reporter David Sanger, writing today:

Officials say that Mr. Gates has been quietly pressing for a pullback that could roughly halve the number of combat brigades now patrolling the most violent sections of Baghdad and surrounding provinces by early next year. The remaining combat units would then take up a far more limited mission of training, protecting Iraq’s borders and preventing the use of Iraq as a sanctuary by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni Arab extremist group that claims to have an affiliation with Osama bin Laden’s network, though the precise relationship is unknown.

Megadittos on Leibovich II

Jay Garrity, the Mitt Romney aide who New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich says pulled him over and claimed to have run his license plate, is now under investigation in both Massachusetts (for allegedly impersonating a state trooper) and New Hampshire (for the Leibovich incident). Nice people you have working for you, Mitt.

Megadittos on Leibovich

Just a brief note on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s denial that one of his goons — uh, aides — tried to intimidate New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich as Leibovich trailed the Mittmobile in his car.

Like Jon Keller, who provides the relevant links, I worked with Leibovich at the Boston Phoenix in the early 1990s. And I endorse this Keller observation: “If Mark Leibovich says it happened that way, it happened exactly that way.”

This isn’t a big deal. Why can’t Romney tell the truth?

Correction of the day

From the New York Times:

An article last Wednesday about a decision by the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, to remove at least five members of Community Board 6 who oppose the Atlantic Yards development project — which Mr. Markowitz supports — misstated the reason for the absence of a response by Mr. Markowitz. At the time the article was being reported, Mr. Markowitz could not be reached by his aides because he was on a ship at sea, had no telephone access and was not regularly checking his e-mail messages. He did not “refuse” to comment.

Spotlight on Newton North

It’s just one high school, so what were the odds that both the New York Times and the Boston Globe would publish two entirely different big stories on Newton North High School today? (Yeah, yeah, I know, both papers are owned by the New York Times Co. But I can’t see this as anything but a coincidence.)

The Times gives front-page, above-the-fold display to Sara Rimer’s feature on “Amazing Girls,” high-achieving young women competing for slots at the nation’s leading colleges and universities. It’s a terrific read, and I think my friend Adam Reilly misses the point — it’s less a paean to these kids’ amazingness than it is a look at the insane pressure they’re under.

I can’t believe folks at the Globe were happy to see the Times steal their lunch money with Rimer’s story. (Although Tracy Jan’s front-page piece on Sylvester Cooper, in danger of dropping out of the Boston schools with an eighth-grade education, certainly fills the paper’s daily quota of socially significant education stories.) Still, the Globe has its own Newton North piece, leading the City & Region section with an interesting look — reported by Ralph Ranalli — at how the new Newton North has managed to run up a price tag of $154.6 million.

Be sure to check out the accompanying graphic, which may be emblematic of how editors at the newly downsized Globe plan to move forward. This is the epitome of local coverage — a long story on cost overruns at one high school, along with a floor-by-floor, interactive chart. No doubt we’re going to see a lot more of this, as major metros like the Globe become more and more local in their focus. Indeed, the Globe even leads the paper today with a story on Proposition 2 1/2 overrides in the suburbs.

Nostalgia note: Nice Globe story by Geoff Edgers on the refurbished Children’s Museum. I was glad to see, in yet another interactive graphic, that the Japanese house survived. The Media Nation family spent many happy afternoons there when the kids were little.