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Huffington Disses NY Times Paywall
Arianna Huffington, who has been engaged in an on-again, off-again war of words with The New York Times, threw down the gauntlet by criticizing the Gray Lady’s new pay wall.
From WWD
Arianna Huffington tossed another grenade in the direction of The New York Times on Wednesday afternoon, during her luncheon address at a Gilt Groupe conference. “The New York Times pay wall isn’t working,” she claimed. “It is so hedged and has so many exceptions that it should be called a hedge wall, not a pay wall.” She went on to contend that a site such as the Times cannot successfully go from free to building a pay wall. “The truth is, people are used to having that information for free.”
The pay wall has been in effect for just a little over a month now and according to the Times, subscriptions have “exceeded expectations in every way” despite reports showing that web page traffic has declined between 11 and 30 percent since it was erected.
But the pay wall figures are being skewed by two main factors. The first is the introductory 99-cent offer for the first month, and the second is the subsidy by Ford Motors’ Lincoln for 100,000 digital subscribers by covering their access fees for the rest of 2011.
While it’s far too early to gauge whether or not the pay wall will be a success, Huffington is correct that it does look more like a hedge and not a wall. With the 20 articles-per-month-free policy along with all the exceptions for search engines and social media sites, it will be easy for the average reader to skirt the pay wall with just a little extra effort.
People are used to getting their information for free and as the early results have shown, many of them have fled the Times’ website in search of free news which is readily available on the web.
The only way the Times can possibly hope to make the pay wall work is to produce content that is both unique and indispensable, and at the current time that isn’t the case.
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About the author
Don Irvine is Chairman of Accuracy in Media. He is active on Facebook and Twitter. You can follow him @donirvine to read his latest thoughts.
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5 Comments for Huffington Disses NY Times Paywall
I have to agree with Mr Maher. There was a time when the NYT was the greatest of the 9NINE9 ‘dailies’ printed & sold in NYC. All were good in there own way,,but,,but,,if you wanted “All the News That was Fit to Print”
More than any other paper,,,it was the Times ,,to be sure. They once had a strike,,& when they came back,,they were wired in bundles of 5 @ 8 lbs.ea. Have you ever seen a newspaper that was as heavy as a gallon of milk.??
Most of it was ‘back’ advertising. Now,,their motto is along the lines of
‘If it fits,,Print it” It has gone steadily down hill since the Radical 60′s & those who believe in the Far-Left have steadily moved it that way,,never to return to good honest journalism.
My Opinion only,,as a Native New Yorker.
The NEW YORK SLIMES is slowly going the way of the dinosour and is fast becomming exinct They grey lady is fading away
I can’t wait until this dog that pretends to be a news organization dies
The Times is a liberal propaganda rag. They think Libs will automatically sign on in great numbers. Trouble is Libs like to spend other peoples’ money, not their own.
The NYT’s attempt to erect a paywall deserves a Graduate School of Business case study rather than political comment. The Gray Lady is the victim of tinkering and retinkering by folk who know not what they do. I dumped my shares in the long ago.
On the face of the matter, the current approach to casual users of freebie access like me does not entice. Why ?
I am a a New Yorker in the exodus who was brought up to believe that NYT was factual and that folk like sometine night editor Neil McNeil would keep it that way. I am now a fully recovered daily and Sunday NYT reader. While I recognized that the death of typewriters and expert rewriters heralded death of traditional news writing amenable to being edited from bottom up and probably would produce windier stories, I hadn’t a clue that I’d come to read front page stories – and they truly have become stories – as though short mysteries by latter day O. Henrys (Rest easy, o great one !). Yet, abandonment of reporting news in favorof wandering features commencing on the front page didn’t deter me. I learned to detect the garbage quickly and move on. A sixty-year habit is hard to break.
Nope, what made paying for NYT print editions 800 hundred miles away was the Lady’s elimination of thorough stock and bond trading reports. NYT forced me to buy the Wall Street !!!
To my pleased surprise, WSJ proved to have a lot of reportage beyond mere commerce and seems to be getting better. NYT ceded the national market !
The sooner the contolling family in presumed decline sells off, the more salvagable the Gray Lady and the better the deal the family will get. But, hey, that’s their problem, not mine and not yours, and will not be addressed by even a well managed transition to paid web edition access.
Cheers !