Joho the Blog
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May 20, 2005
I just heard (!) that the Times is going to start charging $50/year to read its op-ed columnists. (That will also get you access to their archives.) I feel their pain, even as I think it's the wrong decision. The Times is watching its value erode. Electronic distribution is only going to become a bigger part of the picture, its readership is exulting in the exposes of the failures of the MSM to provide full and accurate coverage — the real story about the Newsweek brouhaha is why we are so eager to hear about ways the MSM is failing — and the authority of The Times is being challenged by a new news architecture that denies the necessity of having gatekeepers at all. In this face of all this confusion, the Times has made some smart moves, including giving a backdoor to permalinks to its articles and moving towards dynamically building "topic pages" that aggregate information. This new move, however, is the salmon trying to swim up a perpendicular waterfall. By making us pay to read Krugman, Friedman, et al., the Times asserts the value of its Big Fish experts against the blogging plankton. But what they're actually doing is withdrawing the authority that those experts were earning in the blogosphere through the power of their speech. Krugman, for example, is 10 times more important as a voice on the Web than as Rapunzel locked in a tower. Not everything has to be free, and I'm all in favor of The Times making money. But not at the cost of its value. With this move, the Paper of Record is on its way to becoming the Paper of What-Ever-Happened-To? [Technorati tags: nytimes msm] Ross Mayfield in the comments makes the excellent point that we're likely to see columnists become bloggers in order to rejoin the fray. We can only hope. Meanwhile, Joi is worrying that his blog has changed focus and mood without him being aware of it. Rebecca does some excellent bucking up. Here's mine: Yo, Joi! Your blog reflects you and you don't ever have to worry about being boring. You're just otherly interesting. So, buck up, muh friend! Posted
by D. Weinberger at May 20, 2005 11:07 PM
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Comments
Want to lay odds that the opinionists start their own blogs by consequence?
Posted by: Ross Mayfield | May 21, 2005 01:28 AM
Ross's comment is spot on, and demonstrates that the newspaper business is no different in this respect than the music business.
Musicians discovered that their value increases through more people hearing their music rather than more people buying the company's packaging. By alienating the musicians' customers rather than enabling the musicians' value, musicians discovered that they could go it alone, thereby cutting off the industry's source of supply.
Columnists are discovering that their value increases through more people reading their opinions (and sharing/talking about/writing about those opinions)rather than more people buyng the company's packaging. By alienating the columnists' readers rather than enabling the columnists' value, columnists will soon discover that they can go it alone, thereby cutting off the industry's source of supply.
Sing it with me:
Where have all the columnists gone?
Long time passing.
Where have all the columnists gone?
Long time ago.
Where have all the columnists gone?
Gone to bloggers every one.
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Posted by: Mark Federman | May 21, 2005 01:33 PM
Yes, I agree that Ross's point is most excellent. The answer is blogging in the wind...
Posted by: David Weinberger | May 21, 2005 02:45 PM
My guess is that NYT is already resigned to lowering the price from 50$.
It's an old tactic described in Robert Cialdini's milestone book of social psychology, Influence.
Create a perception of a product costing $50, and then keep ratcheting down the price until you find the point at which people will start rushing to pay. They could also two use tiered pricing (30 bucks for columnists, 50 bucks for columnists and archives).
My guess is $30 is a reasonable pricepoint for daily columnists. Truthfully, the only reason I keep subscribing to salon.com is tom tomorrow (even though I know his cartoon becomes free a few days later). I have a feeling that brand loyalty to NYT depends on their columnists.
Posted by: Robert Nagle | May 23, 2005 08:10 AM
I would be interested in knowing how the columnists make a living on the "value" that their blogs have. I understand that there is more satisfaction in being widely read and discussed, but what is the business model? Selling subscriptions to the blog? selling ads? giving speeches? writing books? all of the above ... to scrabble together something like the income one might have more securely as a columnist with a job?
I am presuming that it's either/or - i.e. if one keeps one's job as columnist with the Times, one does not have a parallel (competing?) blog.
At what point does it become cheaper for the person who wants to read some of the columnists to subscribe to the Times (or other known collective source of columns and other value) rather than to a lot of individual columnist/blogs/web magazines?
I realize the market for newspapers and web sources is in flux, but what economics tempts a columnist to step into the fastest flowing part of that flux?
P.S. A little comparative media test here: will a query to a 10-day-old blog entry draw any comments? Is a 10-day-old blog more "live" than a 10-day-old newspaper? (The 10-day-old TV editorial is of course long gone, not even memory - unless the FCC has got a complaint... or it's accidentally on someone's TiVO.)
Posted by: John G | May 31, 2005 05:59 AM