The NYT would be doing the newspaper/mag industry a huge disservice by under valuing this at the beginning. If they can create something even closely as immersive as what WIRED is doing (see video in link) on the iPad then $30 will be worth it.
The net is a great echo chamber. If you do a lot of research on the net you'll pretty quickly discover how much of what is called "factual" on the net is actually cross-sourced repetition of the same poorly sourced (or completely unsourced) information. Certainly traditional journalists make mistakes, but when they do, they generally have to take responsibility for those mistakes. A lot of the criticism we hear of the NY Times is a result of them actually admitting to an error, which is something the beloved "free news" providers on the net rarely do. The net means never having to say you're sorry.
Amen.
The sophistry on these pages is illuminating. AI can be good light reading for tech info/opinions but considering how stupid many of the comments here about journalism are, I'll be more skeptical of everything else here too. Quacking about the NYTimes being "lefty" - yeah, if your frame of reference is that of a skin-head. The Times had more column-inches devoted to Sarah Palin (now at the lowest point _ever_ in public approval) and the Tea Partiers in the past 2 weeks than they ever wrote about the grass-roots movement that did actually mobilize tens of millions of voters to elect Barack Obama, which were actually political left-of-center organizations, MoveOn and Organizing for America. Now the "mainstream media" are running so scared of Fox/Murdoch and his mouth-frothing, know-nothing shock-troops, it's pathetic - spineless moderates afraid to play hard-ball.
And all this prattle about getting "news" for "free" on the internet. Nothing of value in this world is free. Your new-paradigm of news always being free sounds just like the new-paradigm stock values of the dot-com bubble years (or maybe some of you, already, are too young to remember the 90s). You want groceries? You go to a professional grocer who goes to professional food distributors who goes to professionally-run butchers, dairies, farmers, etc. And you shop around - but everyone is getting paid something - even the jerk you bought your junk food from. You want journalism, you either pay journalists and the news organizations who pay them, with subscription and/or advertising revenue, and consider who's paying their bills as you consume it, or you don't have journalism - you have what we have mostly on line: entertainment, opinion, charlatanism and propaganda. And it's on all sides of the political spectrum who have money to burn to advance their agenda (ergo, the true "left", assuming you could even recognize it, hasn't had a media voice in this country since the 1930s).
It's the _medium_ that's changed - the _content_ - information with integrity - is as old-school as groceries and always will be.
But it's a sign that a trend may have run its course, the pendulum at its farthest-possible point, when there are so many anonymous, obviously myopic blowhards thumping their chests in a reactionary frenzy against paying for content. If you have the time to comb into every nook and cranny on line, hooray for you, but you're basically doing what passes nowadays for investigative journalism _yourself_, so, in that sense, you're right, it's you who should be getting paid - and that's why the content is free because you have to sift through 20 sources before you should consider yourself reasonably informed. But these visionary champions of the digital age sound almost hillbilly in their defense of the crap excuse for journalism that has, thus far, emerged on the internet. This medium is still brand new and is still defining and re-defining itself. Unless someone finds a way to pay for news being gathered, reported and broadcast on the internet, then there will not be any actual news on the internet - and, maybe, so be it. CNN is closing down bureaus around the world and browsing Twitter for the pulse of public opinion after the State of the Union address - if you're not laughing, you should be crying. The dead/dying small-city newspapers, killed by nothing more intriguing than the evaporation of their classified ads revenue, have not been replaced on line - there is simply less and less information getting out except to the die-hard local-politics wonks with a lot of time on their hands. That's why fringe phenomena like the birthers and the tea partiers are getting so much attention - because they're simply yelling so loud and there are fewer and fewer professional journalists minding the store to filter news out from the noise of a crowd of people who are just cranky in the morning after their 8 years of sleep during the W. years.
So I salute the efforts of the Wall Street Journal and the Times in their attempt to find a revenue stream to pay for professional journalism. By all means, charge $6-$10/month - for non-print subscribers only, please - and rake in the dough. $30 seems a little steep, if it's as mass-market as it could be.
So I salute the efforts of the Wall Street Journal and the Times in their attempt to find a revenue stream to pay for professional journalism. By all means, charge $6-$10/month - for non-print subscribers only, please - and rake in the dough. $30 seems a little steep, if it's as mass-market as it could be.
I'm not sure I can add much to what you've already said, but it seems to me that we're in the midst of the confluence of three, separate events which in combination have been deadly to the entire idea of discourse. First is the sustained political attacks on the entire idea of a free press, with the objective of destroying the very concept of objectivity. It's self-reinforcing. Any time the press reports something politically disagreeable to your side, it is just more evidence of their inherent bias towards the other guys. Always distrust the press, was the message we've had pounded into us for the last 20 years or so. Lots of people have bought it, lock stock and barrel.
The second was the ascendancy of cable news and the 24 hour news cycle. Roughly 98% of cable news is utter garbage. Instead of using the vast amounts of time they have available to explain (i.e., to do journalism), they instead fill up that time with cheap, populist sensationalism, political mud wrestling, and mindless partisan nattering, Obviously millions upon millions find this entertaining, and most of them, apparently, also mistake it for being informative. So sad.
The third of course is the internet. In cyberspace you hardly have to even encounter a point of view or a fact which doesn't agree with what you already believe. And if you do, it's considered entirely fair to belittle that person as if they were hardly even human. The net tends to exaggerate and reinforce extreme views, and permit others to be reduced to types and cyphers.
Put them all together and what do you get? The slow agonizing death of democracy, which is precisely what we're seeing now.
FWIW: With about twice the circulation as the NYT, the Wall Street Journal charges less than $9/month for the on-line only version and about $11.50/month for the print and online versions together.
Yes, and the WSJ editorials actually know something about economics and the stories aren't predominately slanted to support a particular brand of politics. I subscribe to the WSJ online and wouldn't subscribe to the NYT unless they started being journalists again instead of political shills on their news pages.
The plight of newspapers is not resulting from financials -- the financials are a symptom of a bigger issue -- the overt ideological basis that is driving readers to other sources of news. While the internet has had the biggest impact on news consumption, scandals at the NYT such as the Jayson Blair scandal, and even the overt politics contained within movie reviews. The Times' lockstep support of things like global warming etc., is also driving readers away. Contrast that to the Daily Telegraph in the UK where readership is on the rise rather than the decline -- and it's been the Telegraph that has been breaking major stories about American politics and global warming controversies. When I have to read a UK paper to get an in depth story of the American government, then there's obviously something wrong. American newspapers and freedom of the press were conceived as a political watchdogs for government. The only watching newspapers were doing was watching Bush -- as soon as the new president took over it seems like all they want to do is continue to watch Bush and criticize his administration. Regardless of whether Bush was wrong or right, the point is that newspapers (The NY Times specifically) need to maintain their vigilance of all political groups instead of acting as Pravda.
The NY Times reads not much differently than the China Daily. I live in China and it's interesting how the China Daily often has more investigative journalism than the formerly prestigious New York Times.
$30 per month for the Times? No way. $1 per month? No way. I'd rather donate that money to Reporters without Borders and support real reporters.
So media under the constant thumb of a totalitarian government in China and a party controlled newspaper in the UK is the solution? I forget, what's the problem again?
(Also, according to the only figures I could find, the only newspapers in the UK with growing circulation are the Financial Times the Guardian, and the Times. The Daily Telegraph lost 8% in circulation in 2008.)
So media under the constant thumb of a totalitarian government in China and a party controlled newspaper in the UK is the solution? I forget, what's the problem again?
He's saying the Times journalism isn't much better in comparison to a newspaper under the control of a communist government which is amusingly sad.
The problem is that the Times isn't a good value for $30. WTF do I want to spend $30 on a NYT electronic sub when I can get WaPo and WSJ for less? WaPo is $11.99/month (Kindle) and WSJ $1.99/week.
Comments
http://agency140.com/wired-mag-intro...eader-on-ipad/
The net is a great echo chamber. If you do a lot of research on the net you'll pretty quickly discover how much of what is called "factual" on the net is actually cross-sourced repetition of the same poorly sourced (or completely unsourced) information. Certainly traditional journalists make mistakes, but when they do, they generally have to take responsibility for those mistakes. A lot of the criticism we hear of the NY Times is a result of them actually admitting to an error, which is something the beloved "free news" providers on the net rarely do. The net means never having to say you're sorry.
Amen.
The sophistry on these pages is illuminating. AI can be good light reading for tech info/opinions but considering how stupid many of the comments here about journalism are, I'll be more skeptical of everything else here too. Quacking about the NYTimes being "lefty" - yeah, if your frame of reference is that of a skin-head. The Times had more column-inches devoted to Sarah Palin (now at the lowest point _ever_ in public approval) and the Tea Partiers in the past 2 weeks than they ever wrote about the grass-roots movement that did actually mobilize tens of millions of voters to elect Barack Obama, which were actually political left-of-center organizations, MoveOn and Organizing for America. Now the "mainstream media" are running so scared of Fox/Murdoch and his mouth-frothing, know-nothing shock-troops, it's pathetic - spineless moderates afraid to play hard-ball.
And all this prattle about getting "news" for "free" on the internet. Nothing of value in this world is free. Your new-paradigm of news always being free sounds just like the new-paradigm stock values of the dot-com bubble years (or maybe some of you, already, are too young to remember the 90s). You want groceries? You go to a professional grocer who goes to professional food distributors who goes to professionally-run butchers, dairies, farmers, etc. And you shop around - but everyone is getting paid something - even the jerk you bought your junk food from. You want journalism, you either pay journalists and the news organizations who pay them, with subscription and/or advertising revenue, and consider who's paying their bills as you consume it, or you don't have journalism - you have what we have mostly on line: entertainment, opinion, charlatanism and propaganda. And it's on all sides of the political spectrum who have money to burn to advance their agenda (ergo, the true "left", assuming you could even recognize it, hasn't had a media voice in this country since the 1930s).
It's the _medium_ that's changed - the _content_ - information with integrity - is as old-school as groceries and always will be.
But it's a sign that a trend may have run its course, the pendulum at its farthest-possible point, when there are so many anonymous, obviously myopic blowhards thumping their chests in a reactionary frenzy against paying for content. If you have the time to comb into every nook and cranny on line, hooray for you, but you're basically doing what passes nowadays for investigative journalism _yourself_, so, in that sense, you're right, it's you who should be getting paid - and that's why the content is free because you have to sift through 20 sources before you should consider yourself reasonably informed. But these visionary champions of the digital age sound almost hillbilly in their defense of the crap excuse for journalism that has, thus far, emerged on the internet. This medium is still brand new and is still defining and re-defining itself. Unless someone finds a way to pay for news being gathered, reported and broadcast on the internet, then there will not be any actual news on the internet - and, maybe, so be it. CNN is closing down bureaus around the world and browsing Twitter for the pulse of public opinion after the State of the Union address - if you're not laughing, you should be crying. The dead/dying small-city newspapers, killed by nothing more intriguing than the evaporation of their classified ads revenue, have not been replaced on line - there is simply less and less information getting out except to the die-hard local-politics wonks with a lot of time on their hands. That's why fringe phenomena like the birthers and the tea partiers are getting so much attention - because they're simply yelling so loud and there are fewer and fewer professional journalists minding the store to filter news out from the noise of a crowd of people who are just cranky in the morning after their 8 years of sleep during the W. years.
So I salute the efforts of the Wall Street Journal and the Times in their attempt to find a revenue stream to pay for professional journalism. By all means, charge $6-$10/month - for non-print subscribers only, please - and rake in the dough. $30 seems a little steep, if it's as mass-market as it could be.
So I salute the efforts of the Wall Street Journal and the Times in their attempt to find a revenue stream to pay for professional journalism. By all means, charge $6-$10/month - for non-print subscribers only, please - and rake in the dough. $30 seems a little steep, if it's as mass-market as it could be.
I'm not sure I can add much to what you've already said, but it seems to me that we're in the midst of the confluence of three, separate events which in combination have been deadly to the entire idea of discourse. First is the sustained political attacks on the entire idea of a free press, with the objective of destroying the very concept of objectivity. It's self-reinforcing. Any time the press reports something politically disagreeable to your side, it is just more evidence of their inherent bias towards the other guys. Always distrust the press, was the message we've had pounded into us for the last 20 years or so. Lots of people have bought it, lock stock and barrel.
The second was the ascendancy of cable news and the 24 hour news cycle. Roughly 98% of cable news is utter garbage. Instead of using the vast amounts of time they have available to explain (i.e., to do journalism), they instead fill up that time with cheap, populist sensationalism, political mud wrestling, and mindless partisan nattering, Obviously millions upon millions find this entertaining, and most of them, apparently, also mistake it for being informative. So sad.
The third of course is the internet. In cyberspace you hardly have to even encounter a point of view or a fact which doesn't agree with what you already believe. And if you do, it's considered entirely fair to belittle that person as if they were hardly even human. The net tends to exaggerate and reinforce extreme views, and permit others to be reduced to types and cyphers.
Put them all together and what do you get? The slow agonizing death of democracy, which is precisely what we're seeing now.
FWIW: With about twice the circulation as the NYT, the Wall Street Journal charges less than $9/month for the on-line only version and about $11.50/month for the print and online versions together.
Yes, and the WSJ editorials actually know something about economics and the stories aren't predominately slanted to support a particular brand of politics. I subscribe to the WSJ online and wouldn't subscribe to the NYT unless they started being journalists again instead of political shills on their news pages.
The plight of newspapers is not resulting from financials -- the financials are a symptom of a bigger issue -- the overt ideological basis that is driving readers to other sources of news. While the internet has had the biggest impact on news consumption, scandals at the NYT such as the Jayson Blair scandal, and even the overt politics contained within movie reviews. The Times' lockstep support of things like global warming etc., is also driving readers away. Contrast that to the Daily Telegraph in the UK where readership is on the rise rather than the decline -- and it's been the Telegraph that has been breaking major stories about American politics and global warming controversies. When I have to read a UK paper to get an in depth story of the American government, then there's obviously something wrong. American newspapers and freedom of the press were conceived as a political watchdogs for government. The only watching newspapers were doing was watching Bush -- as soon as the new president took over it seems like all they want to do is continue to watch Bush and criticize his administration. Regardless of whether Bush was wrong or right, the point is that newspapers (The NY Times specifically) need to maintain their vigilance of all political groups instead of acting as Pravda.
The NY Times reads not much differently than the China Daily. I live in China and it's interesting how the China Daily often has more investigative journalism than the formerly prestigious New York Times.
$30 per month for the Times? No way. $1 per month? No way. I'd rather donate that money to Reporters without Borders and support real reporters.
(Also, according to the only figures I could find, the only newspapers in the UK with growing circulation are the Financial Times the Guardian, and the Times. The Daily Telegraph lost 8% in circulation in 2008.)
So media under the constant thumb of a totalitarian government in China and a party controlled newspaper in the UK is the solution? I forget, what's the problem again?
He's saying the Times journalism isn't much better in comparison to a newspaper under the control of a communist government which is amusingly sad.
The problem is that the Times isn't a good value for $30. WTF do I want to spend $30 on a NYT electronic sub when I can get WaPo and WSJ for less? WaPo is $11.99/month (Kindle) and WSJ $1.99/week.
Dunno why you can't understand that problem.