A Note to Our Readers on the Times Pay Model and the Economics of Reporting – NYTimes.com

Nate Silver on the FiveThirtyEight blog on the NYTimes:

I’m less sympathetic to the notion, however, which I’ve heard in some quarters, that there are a lot of good substitutes for The New York Times. Certainly there are some good substitutes: depending on the type of coverage you’re looking for, The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal or CNN or ESPN.com. Of course, some of these substitutes already charge for digital access, are also having trouble balancing their budgets, or both.

Maybe that’s an issue in some quarters. That’s certainly not my issue. There is little question that the Times is the Paper of Record for original reporting in the US. From Silver’s own tally, that’s pretty clear. My problem is that the pricing model provides incentive to support the status quo: if you take the dead-tree paper, you get the digital edition comped. To get the digital edition only, it generally costs a little bit more.

For example, to get the digital edition exclusively, it’s $15 every four weeks. To get the digital edition comped, I have to pay for the Monday-Friday subscription plan at $3.70 per week, or $14.80 every four weeks. The Sunday Edition is $3.75 per week, or $15 every four weeks.

There’s a really good argument to be made that the times is spot on in their pricing – that for $15 every four weeks, if you’re a Sunday subscriber – you’re getting significantly more value digitally by getting 100% of the Times content every day on your mobile or tablet device. That’s a good thing, to be sure.

But, the thing is, there’s no “Five Easy Pieces” solution. What I want is the digital edition, all the time, every day, and I want them to hold the paper. I do an awful lot, I’m sure, that is not pro environment. I don’t recycle every carton that comes across my kitchen. I probably flush the toilet too often. But there’s little out there to compare with destroying tens of thousands of trees every day to present information when another viable approach exists. I’m not keen on paying into that model anymore when an alternative choice exists.

I wish the Times offered a solution that supported guys like me, a progressive pricing model that encouraged digital consumption with no paper requirement.

Daring Fireball Linked List: The Daily’s Pricing

One more thought on The Times’s pricing: What’s the thinking behind charging more to use their iPad app than their smartphone apps? If I’m paying for the content, what difference does it make how big my screen is? To me, the extra $5/month they’re charging for iPad app access indicates that they see iPad users as suckers to be fleeced.

Insane. They’re back-pocketing failure here. If the Times digital initiative fails, it’s because they can’t afford – or refuse – to admit that they’ll have to destroy their print production infrastructure to make digital succeed absolutely. It will suck. People will lose their jobs. But at some point, the change will happen, and either the Times will be at the heart of it, or they won’t. The problem with the latter is that they end up looking dumb and irrelevant, and all their best reporters will go to work for HuffPo. Worlds collide, indeed.

The Daily Maverick :: Internet kills the PR star: The all-new DIY churnalism detector

Now, eight decades or so later, we have churnalism.com. A non-commercial site funded by the Media Standards Trust, it allows users to paste in press releases and compare them with all the news in the UK’s national papers, as well as with stories on the BBC site and Sky News online. The word “churnalism” comes from Nick Davies’s book “Flat Earth News,” and means exactly what it appears to mean – an item in a newspaper published as journalism that is, in fact, a barely reworked press release.

Churnalism.com. Handy tool, that.

Aol To Journalists: You Be The Rock Star, We’ll Be Mark Chapman

Paul Carr with strategies for Aol to improve the bottom line.

• Only completely restructuring the entire company three times a week, instead of five.
• Ending the company’s popular “let’s burn all our money” Fridays.
• Increasing the cost of AOL dial-up and broadband to $10,000 a month “because those fucking idiots will buy anything.”
• …
• Making all potential editorial hires take a Turing test and rejecting any who pass.

There’s more. Worth a quick read.

AOL to Cut Up to 900 Jobs as It Integrates Huffington Post – Bloomberg

Says the man who brought us “The Aol Way:”

“AOL will invest more heavily in our in-house editorial team and transition away from a reliance on freelance journalists,” he said. “Journalists are the heart and soul of a media company.”

Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media, James Fallows:

Fifteen years ago, I published a book, Breaking the News, which argued that a relentless focus on scandal, spectacle, and the “game” of politics was driving citizens away from public affairs, making it harder for even the least cynical politicians to do an effective job, and at the same time steadily eroding our public ability to assess what is happening and decide how to respond. And this was in an era that in retrospect seems innocent.

Not that we need any more evidence that the nature of journalism has changed. But that, really, is the crux and Journalism has changed. It’s now lower-case-j journalism for the most part, and to find Journalism that matters anymore, the responsibility is on us to seek it out.

That’s not to say that what Gawker does is inherently bad. I read Gawker properties all the time. But the organization is representative of how habits have changed seemingly over night.

The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories? | Epicenter | Wired.com, Frank Rose:

We stand now at the intersection of lure and blur. The future beckons, but we’re only partway through inventing it. We can see the outlines of a new art form, but its grammar is as tenuous and elusive as the grammar of cinema a century ago.

We know this much: people want to be immersed. They want to get involved in a story, to carve out a role for themselves, to make it their own. But how is the author supposed to accommodate them? What if the audience runs away with the story? And how do we handle the blur—not just between fiction and fact, but between author and audience, entertainment and advertising, story and game? A lot of smart people—in film, in television, in video games, in advertising, in technology, even in neuroscience—are trying to sort these questions out. The Art of Immersion is their story.