By: E&P Staff It might soon cost money to read The New York Times Web site, the paper said today.
There are no immediate plans to charge a subscription fee for access to NYTimes.com, but it is something the paper is considering.
"We are reviewing the site to see whether or not there would be any areas where we should change the business model," said the paper's spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis, according to a Reuters report.
The upcoming issue of BusinessWeek, which features a cover story on The New York Times Co., says there's been an internal debate on the question of subscriptions. "It gets to the question of how comfortable are we training a generation of readers to get quality information for free," Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., the paper's publisher, is quoted as saying in the article. "That is troubling."
The Times site had about 18.5 million unique visitors in November, according to the Reuters report. The Wall Street Journal Online, which does require a paid subscription, had about 701,000 subscribers in the third quarter, paying $79 per year, or $39 if they also subscribe to the print version.
Late in the day, Dow Jones & Co., which owns the Journal, issued comments from its president of electronic publishing, Gordon Crovitz, responding to the possibility the Times might follow their model.
"Many newspaper publishers got caught up in the hype of the web in the 1990s and decided that people would not pay for content if it were delivered online. The Wall Street Journal Online was roundly criticized at the time, with so-called experts lecturing us that the web had to be free. We recently reported that we had more than 700,000 paying subscribers to WSJ.com," Crovitz said in the statement.
"Subscription revenues are critically important to news publishers such as The Wall Street Journal that have large news departments. Advertising pays only some of the bills in print, and that's equally true online."
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