Is The New York Times The Paper Of An Obsolete Record?
from the can't-keep-up-with-the-times dept
We’ve discussed many times how newspapers simply don’t get the internet, and Adam Penenberg is suggesting that there may be no greater example than the NY Times. The Times, of course, was one of the first online newspapers to require online registration and set up a paid archive for articles after a short period of free time online. However, because of that, the New York Times results barely appear at all in Google. If they’re striving to be “the paper of record” then they need to be where people are looking — and these days, people are looking in Google. Penenberg notes that despite the fact that the Times makes very little money off of those archives, they won’t open them, because it might endanger their $20 million per year deal with Lexis-Nexis. Talk about getting hung up by legacy systems. Either way, it’s a good point that the folks at the NY Times (and other newspapers) need to realize. Being online means being accessible. If you’re not, then today’s surfers aren’t going to care. You may believe you can hang onto a small group and sell their demographic data to advertisers, but the data is dirty and the times are changing. People don’t want to jump through hoops when there’s a lot of other content out there, and if the command line of the internet is a search engine, these sites that block themselves off are simply making themselves obsolete.
Comments on “Is The New York Times The Paper Of An Obsolete Record?”
Price of Clean Data
It still seems fair to charge a price for reliable data that rises above the noise?
Re: Price of Clean Data
I don’t believe in paying for ANY services online. I run a couple of websites that are absolutely free. I provide a service out of the goodness of my heart. My dayjob pays my bills, not my webjob. If you NEED online cash to run your website, get off the net. The net is about sharing information, not about opening up a gazillion “stores”. jeesh!
Re: Re: Price of Clean Data
uhhh, I think the net is another medium to make a viable business out of. People work hard to get that information together. Why shouldn’t they get paid?
I’m not for the NYTimes, I think they are a bunch of blowhards, but this nonsense about not getting paid and everything should be free is crap. If you want to charge for what you hard to put on the web, then you should. If you want it free, then so be it. But it shouldn’t be by default that something is free.
Re: Re: Re: Price of Clean Data
Sure, they can charge. That’s not the point. The point is that, with the way the internet works, if you’re going to want to matter going forward, you need to be found. The next generation isn’t going to care about the name “The New York Times.” They’re just going to care about what they can find in a search engine… and if you can’t find The New York Times in a search engine, then people won’t go there.
Re: Re: Re:2 Price of Clean Data
Doesn’t techdirt depend on selling clean data for its business model?
Re: Re: Re:3 News sites ARE biased
Several of my coworkers & I have been informally discussing the slanted styles of different news website for several months.
FoxNews is Republican.
CNN, MSNBC are Democrats.
Mike is right, the next generation won’t know or care about The New York Times.
I know I’ve pretty much forgotten about it.
Re: Price of Clean Data
How does that apply to the New York Times these days?
is the NYT still important?
The more important question is whether the New York Times is even good enough any more to be worth caring about. The editors’ recent display of disregard for the truth throws its reputation into considerable doubt.
Re: is the NYT still important?
Not really, I quit reading it a few years ago.
There was too much opinion passing as news on the front page.
Re: Re: is the NYT still important?
Yes, Fox News is a much better source of news.
Nexis-Lexis
Nexus-Lexis is a huge deal used by pretty much everybody who matters, an 20 million dollars is a pile of money. Being on GoogleNews is worth how much?
Maybe someday soon, but right now Google news is not a real source for ‘legitimate’ journalists, Nexus-Lexis is.
No Subject Given
It is not just Google, many of the ‘weird news’ compliations that I check have sent me there before…..and I always immediately close the window. There are way too many other web sites to go to that don’t require sign up.
Brave New eWorld
In a perfect world we’d get more reviews like this one: judicious, eloquent, and animated by compelling prophetic ideas.
Sadly, last week my favourite newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au took the leaf out of NY Times amazon.book of how to fail in a new brave eWorld…