A Selection of Questions for the Times

(this post was written by Kyle on September 19, 2005, and it concerns & & )

Would it be an exaggeration to say that the mainstream media has has begun to rethink its relationship with its audience? That more and more media executives are starting to realize that more and more people don’t want to be passive receptors, but active participants? Would it be wrong to say that news organizations are beginning to think about inviting more people into their process? And would it be a mistake to suggest that the best way a news organization can stay relevant is to be the organization that drives the national debate?

Now, if you’re a large organization that employs several different thought-provoking writers to communicate your messages, wouldn’t your power depend upon the largest number of people having access to those writers? Wouldn’t you want as many people as possible to read what those writers had to say? If more people had access to them, wouldn’t that mean that your messages had a better chance at being the major topics of conversation? Isn’t that the kind of power a news organization wants?

If so, then why would you want to prevent people from reading your message?

If you don’t know, the New York Times started a new service today called . Here’s what they have to say about it:

Subscribers to TimesSelect have exclusive online access to many of our most influential columnists in Op-Ed, Business, New York/Region and Sports. In addition to reading the columns, TimesSelect subscribers can also engage with our columnists through video interviews and Web-only postings….TimesSelect costs $49.95 a year and will be free for home delivery subscribers to the newspaper. [Emphasis added]

What this means is that most of the people on the Internet will no longer be able to read what the NY Times columnists have to say about a given topic. I don’t know about you, but I focused at least some of my attention on whatever events the columnists happened to be talking about. I wouldn’t always agree with what they said, but they always made me think about something I usually wasn’t thinking about.

In turn, I would usually post something to my blog about it. And then a few of my friends and visitors would take exception to something and we’d end up arguing about it for a few days. I’m sure this happened on a lot of different, under-the-radar kind of blogs. They talked about what the New York Times was talking about.

I’ve never read the Times to get basic information on a news story. I read it for its editorials and commentary. But now they’ve gone and locked them off from the rest of the Internet. Do they really think I’m going to pay to get them back? They might have been good, but they weren’t that good. Not in a world where I have, literally, hundreds of thousands of different places to get my news commentary.

The obvious reason for the new service is to generate some sort of income from the Web. Membership in the service is free to their newspaper subscribers, but non-subscribers need to lay down some cash to become a member. A very few mainstream media players have actually figured out a way to make money on the Web, and the Times is taking its shot. From a purely monetary standpoint, it just makes sense for them to charge an access fee. The writers don’t have to do anything different, and people start paying for what was already free. It’s like found money.

The question, though, is what do they gain and what do they lose by doing such a thing. I have to think that a very limited number of people are going to pay for the new service. So they’re not going to gain anything significant in the way of income. On the other hand, they’re going to lose a large percentage of the power that they now possess by locking people out of the conversation. I know that I probably won’t be linking to the Times again anytime soon. And there are at least a few hundred other bloggers who have made the same decision.

So the Times has got to ask itself: Would it rather make a few thousand bucks or drive a few thousand conversations?

Unfortunately, we already know the answer. And is crying in his grave.