I’m sick of talking about the NYT pay wall, but sometimes I just can’t get over how much media elites despise their customers. Pinch Sulzberger (via John Gruber):
“Can people go around the system?” Sulzberger asked during an appearance at The Paley Center for Media here. “The answer is yes. There are going to be ways. Just as if you run down Sixth Avenue right now and you pass a newsstand and grab the paper and keep running you can actually get the Times free,” he said.
“We have to accept that. Is it going easy? No. Is it going to be done by the kind of people who buy the quality news and opinion of the New York Times? We don’t think so,” he said.
“It’ll be mostly high school kids and people out of work,” Sulzberger said, before adding “I can’t believe I said that.”
There’s this strange undercurrent of hatred towards anyone who reads news online, they’re angry bloggers in the their pajamas, they’re high school kids and people out of work! I don’t see how this bodes well for elite media as we move towards a world where everyone reads the paper on line and most try to avoid paying for it if they can do so easily.
Angry Black Lady
it’s like you’re in my apartment or something.
::looks around::
Karmakin
If they actually respected their customers then they’d actually provide “quality news and opinion”.
Or to be more precise, they wouldn’t know what quality was if it came up and bit them on the ass.
Morbo
Someone needs to make a blog that does nothing but link to individual NYT articles and blog entries as a way to circumvent the paywall. Call it fuckyouarthursulzberger.com. Hell, someone might have already done it.
beltane
You forgot the “assholes” tag. Where to begin. Let’s see, is Sulzberger saying that the only people who will get around the paywall will be students and the unemployed, who won’t actually read the NYT because they don’t appreciate the “quality” news coverage? Kids are going to steal the NYT just for kicks while the real people who matter will pay full price because all those lifestyle puff pieces are central to their existence or something?
I give up. Sulzberger seems to be saying that he wants a customer base made up solely of my mother-in-law (my own mother is a NY’er who would so be into getting around the paywall) and three of her closest friends. Good luck with that.
ed
What a dick.
beltane
@Karmakin: Or they could provide quality news and dispense with the opinion part altogether. Pundits add nothing beneficial to our public discourse; let them go and get real jobs somewhere. Oh, and all those annoying lifestyle sections that have proliferated over the years need to just disappear as in DIAF.
kdaug
The perception is that bloggers are a direct threat to putting on a suit and tie, and going to a big building downtown, to do serious journalism(tm).
It’s not entirely inaccurate.
(ETA: They went to journalism school, too! Some are still paying off student loans! Who the fuck are these “bloggers”??)
(ETA2: “How DARE they!”)
Phoebe
not to mention a world where more and more people are out of work.
Social Outcast
Doesn’t Sulzberger know anything about the internet? Bored office workers run amok reading news sites, blogs, and forums. I can waste time getting content for free.
Martin
That’s not what he’s saying btw. He’s saying that the only people that will deliberately go to lengths to get around the paywall are ‘mostly high school kids and people out of work’
I think the NYT would love for their online subscription model to work.
beltane
P.S.-Since I started reading The Guardian a few months ago, my patience for the NYT has worn thin. If they want me to go back, they will have to pay me.
p mac
The real issue is people who regularly buy the times at the newsstand.
They have to pay twice: once at the store and again on line.
MBunge
I second Martin. Pinch gives every appearance of being a waste of space, but he’s not talking about people who read news online. He’s talking about people who think they’re entitled to read the NYT online for free.
Mike
MikeJ
Didja see what the boingers linked to this am? NYT will cost $100 more than The Economist, WSJ, and the Daily Combined.
beltane
@Martin:Of course Sulzberger would love the on-line subscription model to work. Where he errs is in assuming that the only people who want to make it work for them are high-school students.
Zifnab
There’s an undercurrent of hatred towards the young and the poor. Blogging has nothing to do with it. You see this shit in so much policy and so much rhetoric.
When they talk about minimum wage one common counter-argument is “it’s just kids who get paid minimum wage” as though if you’re under the age of 30, fuck you we’re not giving you any money.
When they talk about college kids, there’s inevitably some invective about the people being lazy or drug abusers or confused little nobodies without brains. See any argument about student voting rights and how college kids aren’t really residents of their college districts.
About the only time a kid is given any kind of status is when he’s before a judge, at which point there is nothing you can do to that person that is too extreme. Even if you are a rich kid, the response is “Go have your parents protect you”.
This culture fucking despises its youth. I’ve seen the shit since I was eight years old. Our parents’ generation absolutely hate us assuming they even give us the time of day. We’re cheap labor on a good day. Peasants to be ignored or kicked on a bad one.
God I hate those assholes at the NYTimes.
PurpleGirl
This morning when I got the ad inviting me to sign up for the on-line access I did. I was prepared to link to Krugman through his twitter feed (as he suggested would be possible). But what the hell, I’m unemployed (although not of high school age) and free is nice however I get it. The decision will come for 2012 if I want to pay anything or if I’ve learned the backdoors that will get me what articles I want.
FlipYrWhig
The other day we were talking about those TV commercials for the NYT “Weekender” package and how smug and appalling all the people were. But that, it seems, is the NYT “brand.” They’re un-self-consciously elite.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@beltane:
When the Washington (com)Post eventually does this, I’ll expect the same from them.
Paul in KY
@Social Outcast: Word on that. I read the Times online, but if I have to pay, off to one of the 346,245,199 free non-porn sites I go.
parsimon
Huh. Very bad form. Very bad.
scav
@beltane: Another nice thing about having a foreign (or set of foreign) news sources as a base is the calming realization that everyone’s nuts. No one understands when you giggle at Milliband jokes though.
bjacques
I think the NYT paywall needs a big, screen-filling FBI warning against copying their content. You know, like what people see when they buy movies or pay to watch them in theaters, as opposed to what they see when they just download torrents.
geg6
@beltane:
THIS.
I will now consign the NYT to the same dustbin of my history that the WaPo disappeared into about 4 years ago. Fuck the NYT and fuck the Sulzbergers. I can’t remember the last time I needed either of those rags to get the news I needed.
Captain Haddock
Are High School kidz reading the NYT’s these days? I guess things have changed a lot since my day…
geg6
@beltane:
Right there with you.
Oh, and Punch or Pinch or whatthefuckever idiotic nickname you go by? I’m not cheap.
azlib
The Internet has created a world where content is free or nearly free. This drives the bean counters crazy. Instead of adapting their business model to the new reality, they spend millions creating a walled garden with a tollbooth.
Mark S.
Why on earth does he think high school kids are dying to read the NY Times?
Elvis Elvisberg
When I went to college, in the mid-1990s, and first got on the Web, I was shocked that everyone just had all their content up there for free. “What a bizarre moment in time,” I thought.
Now those are entrenched expectations for everyone under, I dunno, 35.
As to the viability of getting people to pay for content, Matt Yglesias pointed out recently that this is a new idea– news has always been mostly supported by advertisers.
Yeah, I’m sure they often get clicks when people navigate on by a paper’s main page, but who the hell would ever pay for that stuff?
FlipYrWhig
@geg6: Maybe this one is “Ponch,” like Erik Estrada.
Cat Lady
Pinch or Punch or whatever the fuck twit junior calls himself should just tell everyone to suck on his 1040, and stop pretending he gives a shit about journalism or anything else.
Asshole.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
New technology wreaks havoc on the distributors. We’ve seen it in music, and publishing. Newspapers also fall in that positions. The one service they really offer now is aggregating content and distributing income from that. They should be able to do that online in the same way they do now: Charge advertisers for eyeballs. They just haven’t figured out yet that they’re not going to get their $1 per issue sold.
The Moar You Know
I’ve solved Sulzberger’s problem for him. Since 2003, when the NY Times decided to become a pipline for war propaganda, a mouthpiece for the Bush administration, and an cheerleader for American conservatism, I stopped reading them online.
Hopefully that will satisfy his sensibilities regarding us horrid internet people.
I also no longer read it in print, either.
That will, in the long run, give Sulzberger considerably more heartburn than the idea of some guy in his pajamas reading the daily literary masterworks of his pet stable of reporters on an iPad.
PurpleGirl
@Mark S.: Probably thinks the high school kids are geeks and hackers in training. Not that they want to read the Times but they see the paywall as something to get behind and crack. He’s clueless and old… they claim to have spent 40 million to create the paywall, that don’t impress high school hackers.
Incoherent Dennis SGMM
Because high school kids and people out of work deliberately and wantonly turned down every chance to not be high school kids or people out of work.
The undercurrent of hatred toward the young and the poor that Zifnab mentioned in #16 is directly attributable to decades of conservative efforts to set us against each other. Cut a group away from the herd, vilify it, deprive it of a voice. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Poopyman
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: Ditto. Really the only thing I miss from the WaPo is Mark Trail.
Talk about a low bar….
geg6
@PurpleGirl:
Hell, we give it away free to our student body and the guy who fills the machines on campus says that perhaps one issue of the NYT per week is snapped up by our college students (most likely for a class assignment of some sort). He says the NYT makes the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Beaver County Times look like sales juggernauts among our students.
asiangrrlMN
I think it’s also fear. They are on their last legs, and they don’t know what to do about it. The scope of this internet thing is beyond this guy’s ken.
Mark S.
@PurpleGirl:
$40 million? Really? Did they hire Goldman Sachs to do it? I bet porn sites don’t pay $40 million to create a paywall.
That could have paid for a lot of fact checkers and editors.
Harold
How long, O Sulzberger and Keller, will you abuse our patience? Have you no decency, at long last, sirs, no decency?
Silver Owl
The snotty arrogant persona that so many of the so called business elites have is quite revolting. That is very bad for business when your companies higher up make your customers want to throw up, go else where or do without.
Dimestore Chaucer
@Morbo:
http://twitter.com/freenyt/firehose
Jonathan
I really can’t see why what he said is all that bad… If you asked me who I think might try to get around the pay wall, I’d say the exact same thing, except he probably meant college kids, not high-school kids. (And if that’s a problem, they should probably grant academic subscriptions)
It was slightly asshole-ish, and I think he realized it when he said it, but I think you all just need to stop reading into this stuff so heavily.
I don’t know what NYT’ financial situation is exactly, but I can’t imagine online ads are enough to keep funding the kind of journalism they do. With paper readership on the decline, I can’t really blame them for wanting to flirt with a pay wall (I’ll gladly eat crow though if someone can point me towards a good analysis of their financials). The pricing scheme is shit though.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
What he means, of course, is “anyone worth taking knowing or who is otherwise a very serious person(TM) has the means to buy an online subscription, and will do so,” (for those awkward times when the gardener took the wrong section to layer into that new flowerbed he’s starting on the north side of the property, and reading must be done online).
Martin
@beltane: No, actually. Apparently where he errs is presuming that the NYT should be entitled to a business model that actually generates income.
The unspoken problem here is Google and the online payment merchants. The former is effectively the sole gatekeeper to online advertising revenue, which NYT is unable to make work for their case. The latter have ensured that there is no micropayment infrastructure capable of handling small transactions to allow them to do a la carte consumption. So what options do they have? Full paywall for print subscribers only and tell the online folks to fuck off completely, or some hybrid bastard like they’ve come up with.
I agree that their payment model is flawed, but I disagree that they have no right to be paid.
Parallel 5ths (Irish Steel)
Out of work
I can’t believe I just said that
Out of work
I can’t believe I just said that
Out of work
I can’t believe I just said that
Out of work
I can’t believe I just said that
Echo diminishes
Cut to scene of Sulzberger peering out of his refrigerator box in a deserted Bronx alleyway.
Karmakin
FWIW I “pirate” a majority of the time when I read a print newspaper. There might be one left on a counter when I’m eating or waiting somewhere, or in a waiting room. Things like that.
That’s how people “pirate” in real life. Like it or not, content is free for the majority of people. It’s thought of as to be free. What we pay for is the packaging of the content.
What the NYT and other papers haven’t done is come up with a package that’s compelling to pay for. And I suspect they won’t.
kwAwk
@Martin:
I glad somebody said it.
I remember as a kid borrowing my friends’ tapes and CDs and recording them for my own use, but now that I’m an adult I pay for the recordings I want.
Why should news be any different? Are we that spoiled by the internet that we think everything should be free?
If so then who exactly is going to pay for all of the reporting the NYT provides? Are the Sulzburgers going to run the Times at a loss out of the goodness of their hearts?
Or perhaps we’re going to rely on the likes of CNN and Foxnews to snoop out that next big story….
Incoherent Dennis SGMM
@Karmakin:
I’m so evil that I go to the library to read newspapers.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
kth
Leaving aside the IP propaganda about stealing a digital copy being identical with stealing a physical object, it’s really nice to know that the Times publisher scion (or whatever his relation exactly is) thinks that unemployed people are losers without scruples. I can’t imagine that that would affect their coverage of the economy.
MikeJ
@kwAwk:
The Moonies did it for decades.
BombIranForChrist
Somebody needs to get off his lawn.
Calouste
@Elvis Elvisberg:
Indeed. It is even more obvious at magazines than it is at newspapers. You can get things like Time for a yearly subscription fee that hardly covers the mailing costs.
The main problem for the publishers is that they can’t convince the advertizers to pay the same for online publications as print, but that is there own fold. Advertizers shouldn’t care about piracy btw, the more people see their ads the better.
Pat
I haven’t spent a dime on print in decades and I’ll be damned if I’ll do it online for the New York Times. I hate to burst Junior’s bubble, but his newspaper is not all THAT GREAT anymore.
R-Jud
@Calouste:
Ugh, but why would you?
TIME announces new adult version
fraught
A while back, when Judy Miller was in jail, I was talking to Bill Keller’s longtime assistant and mentioned to her that negative stories about JM were all over the internet. This was when the Times was still supporting her. “Fuck the internet!” she literally shouted. This was in a room full of Times staff. The impression I got was that everyone shared her opinion and that she was saying something that was resonating from the top down.
I don’t think they’ve changed much over there.
Comrade Luke
@Zifnab:
Huh?
Every measurement of culture, at least related to marketing, flies in the face of this. Everyone’s going for the tween-30 demographic.
Aaron S. Veenstra
This should be no surprise — are there any big businesses that don’t see themselves in an adversarial relationship with their customers?
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
maybe denton is a sore subject around here, but gawker’s headline: rabid teen news junkies itching to beat new york times pay wall.
YellowJournalism
I’ve known young people who would try to get around paywalls all the time, but it wasn’t for viewing news coverage. In fact, coverage was usually optional.
Angry Black Lady
@beltane: amen. it’s amazing how much news one finds online at guardian and bbc. NYT and WaPo are useless.
RalfW
Be sure and order two print copies of the NYT if you and wifey want to both read it. Because, otherwise you’re practically stealing it and running down the street if you’re the second one to touch the damn thing.
I’m pretty sure USA Today pays for the janitors at airports to throw away their fishwrap the second it’s abandoned, so that no delayed, snowbound traveler dares read a ‘freebie.’
HyperIon
Zifnab wrote:
Comrade Luke responds to Zifnab: Huh?
Remember that “I want my MTV!” ad.
(It was probably before Zifnab was born.)
Bill
Sulzberger is merely adding a contemptuous veneer to the tired refrain of many executives in print journalism: “It’s not our fault the business is in the crapper.”
Gawd I’ve been hearing this since before I jumped ship. The reason the industry was/is going downhill is because it’s run by people who don’t have ink in their veins. Because when it was, we damn well sold papers for more than two centuries. Goddamn crybabies. It’s all about content. You screwed the pooch. You let beats go dark. You dumbed down the product for people who don’t read. You fired the fact checkers and slapped (yet another) pretty wrapper design and clucked “now the paper’s better.”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to run down Sixth Avenue.
Kirk Spencer
@Comrade Luke: Seeing the youth as a cash cow and despising it are not mutually antagonistic positions.
drkrick
@Mark S.: In my HS days, we used to read the Times for about 10 minutes at the start of every World History class (pretty good deal for both student AND teacher) and one morning I ran across the obituary for Howlin’ Wolf. It kept referring to him as “Mr. Wolf.” Such a self-important combination of dogged insistence on their precious style book and lack of enough good sense to use it with his real name (there was never a Mr. Wolf, but he was Mr. Burnett his whole life, at least after he left Mississippi). The memory of that has always made it impossible for the NYT not to seem a little ridiculous to me.
mclaren
Well, who knows, maybe Apple will take over the world with their ipods and ipads and everyone will have to live in their walled garden and the content can be totally controlled and won’t even run on any platform not controlled by Big Biz Inc.
Yeah, and maybe magic purple unicorns will start shitting hundred dollar bills out of their asses and make us all rich…
different church-lady
I have no love for the NYTs, but it is quite obvious he meant the people who deliberately tried to circumvent the paywall would be those kinds of people. Still a bit arrogant, but not at all what you’re saying he meant.
68 comments, and no one* has mentioned this very obvious point. Lazy thinking people, lazy thinking.
*UPDATE: my mistake, Jonathan at #43 caught it. Maybe there’s some others I didn’t catch with my aging eyes…
grumpy realist
Maybe we’d pay if there was more actual content?
I pay a seemingly outrageous amount for a FT subscription but I’m perfectly happy to do so because every single article in that newspaper contains some actual news. (About the only time the FT gets silly is on the weekends, and even the “human interest” stuff is actual reporting.)
The local fishwrap here a.k.a. the Chicago Tribune has over the years filled more and more of their pages with larger and larger ads (usually for cars or fur salons with “big sales!”), a perfunctory nod towards “national and international news” with some AP articles, and less and less reporting of what’s actually going on here in Chicago. No wonder the damn thing went bankrupt.
Harold
The Times has made bad real estate investments. They are resorting to renting out their fancy new Enzo Piano-designed building for wedding parties. Not making this up.
They want too large a profit. They pay their executives way too much, and they are like doctors — “out of touch”, and with a glaring contempt for anyone outside their charmed circle and with no idea of the extent of what they don’t know or how they come across. Nevertheless, you can find out a lot from reading them carefully, as I.F. Stone used to say. And they do have a few wonderful writers who certainly deserve public acclaim and a decent life-style.
Paul in KY
@Bill: Excellent points. It takes money to produce a quality product. When you skimp & dumb it down, people who are reading it notice.
Not to mention when you become a Neocon mouthpiece.
john b
@Morbo:
a twitter feed was set up as soon as the terms of the paywall were set up.
also, the nyt official twitter feed acts as basically the same thing.