The pundits (ourselves included) just can’t get enough of analyzing, trashing and otherwise second-guessing The New York Times‘ new online subscription plan. Here are some recent posts we noticed.

Steve Outing Pretty Much Trashes the NYT Paywall

For starters, it’s too expensive. The $15/mo minimum makes the Times all but inaccessible to cash-strapped young readers, which happen to be the people the paper most needs to engage. He also hates the defensive posturing publishers are using to justify subscription fees: “We need to do this to survive.”

Now THERE’s an incentive to customers to support you: Tell them if they don’t, you’re going to go out of business. How’s that working out for you, General Motors?

Outing points to the Times‘ own David Carr as the source of the right price: $4.99/mo. Respondents to Carr’s defense of the paywall plan posted on nytimes.com repeatedly refer to that fee as one they can swallow. Is anyone upstairs listening?

How To Hack the New York Times Paywall … With Your Delete Key

Mashable reports a new way to easily breach the paywall: “Readers need only remove “?gwh=numbers” from the URL. They can also clear their browser caches, or switch browsers as soon as they see the subscription prompt. All three of these simple fixes will let them continue reading.”

The NYT’s Melting Iceberg Syndrome

Frédéric Filloux suggests that The New York Times could improve its profitability by going to Sunday-only publication and forgetting about the other six days of the week, at least in print. “Sunday circulation is 54% higher than on weekdays…Sunday copy sales bring five times more money than any weekday…Some analysts say the Sunday NYT accounts for about 50% of the paper’s entire advertising revenue.”

If the Times could cut more than half its expenses by eliminating six days’ worth of print, it could theoretically make more money by publishing less frequently.

We also liked Filloux’ use of an iceberg as the analogy for a business that’s collapsing from within: “As an iceberg melts, the resulting change of shape can cause it to list gradually or to become unstable and topple over suddenly.” See any similarities to what’s happening to print?

A Big Op to Upgrade Op-Ed at New York Times

Alan Mutter believe the departure of Times columnists Frank Rich and Bob Herbert presents an historic opportunity for the Old Gray Lady to become the amazing technicolor dreamcoat of diversity of opinion. If Times‘ columnists are so smart, how come they missed the historic events going on the Middle East? Mutter asks. That’s what happens when your world is limited to Manhattan and the Beltway.

“Instead of dedicating the bulk of its limited and precious op-ed space to another generation of slightly more diverse Pooh-Bahs, the Times should publish the best of the online conversations in its print editions,” the Newsosaur recommends. That would be both good journalism and good promotion for the Time’s pricey paywall.

New York Times Digital Subscriptions: The Unofficial FAQ Updated

PaidContent.org has a useful rundown of the ins and outs of the Times‘ paywall, including pricing tiers, thresholds and platforms. Can you get a family account to nytimes.com? You’ll just have to read this FAQ to find out.

From the Onion: NYTimes.com’s Plan To Charge People Money For Consuming Goods, Services Called Bold Business Move

“In a move that media executives, economic forecasters, and business analysts alike are calling ‘extremely bold,’ NYTimes.com put into place a groundbreaking new business model today in which the news website will charge people money to consume the goods and services it provides.”

It took The New York Times more than a year to design its paywall, and it took the rest of us about 24 hours to figure out ways around it. Ah, the wisdom of crowds.
The Times‘s paywall won’t go up in the U.S. until next week, but it’s already in full flower in Canada, where a programmer named David Hayes has come up with a bookmarklet that vaporizes the Javascript overlay that blocks a non-paying reader from accessing an article. Drag the “NYTClean” tool to your bookmark bar and click it when you want to read.Voilà. Read on to learn how it works.
The Times has also asked Twitter to disable an account someone created last week that uses the social media exemption in the paywall design to permit free access. The feed is called FreeNYTimes, but we don’t expect it to be around very long. The Times charges trademark infringement, which is pretty ridiculous, since someone will simply reconstitute the same idea under a different name. On the other hand, the Times had no alternative, since the account doesn’t violate any of its terms of service.
Joshua Benton dissects this emerging cat-and-mouse game, and also explains how Hayes’ workaround works. The Times chose a novel way to intercept and block visitors who exceed the limit of 20 free articles per month. Instead of denying them access to the content, the site covers the article with a Javascript overlay while leaving the full article visible but obscured in the background. Blocking Javascript is easy. In fact, browsers let you do it  by default. NYTClean basically strips some tags from the HTML source code that the browser sees so that the Javascript overlay doesn’t show.
The Twitter workaround is simpler and much tougher to prevent. It takes advantage of a unique provision in the Times‘ terms of service that permits links from social media sources to go around the paywall. The Times should be commended for acknowledging the importance of word-of-mouth marketing, but it also created a gaping hole in its revenue plan in the process.
Consider this: The entire contents of nytimes.com are available as RSS feeds, which presumably aren’t going away when the paywall goes up. Free services like Dlvr.it can take any RSS feed and deliver it through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Buzz and any number of other social outlets. All you have to do is purchase one free subscription, grab all the RSS feeds and syndicate them through the social network of your choice. Everyone in your circle can now share your subscription. That’s what @FreeNYTimes.com is doing. Anyone can do the same thing in about a half hour.
Which means that if the the Times’ sincerely wants to shut down rogue operations like @FreeNYTimes, it is buying into a giant whack-a-mole game. Except maybe the Times isn’t all that worried about those scallywags. Joshua Benton quotes Times executives as being concerned about violations, but not inclined to throw too many resources at preventing them. They say any preventive scheme will be defeated by a small number of geeks, but the vast majority of readers won’t go to the trouble of seeking out the workarounds. They’ll just shell out the $15-$35 per month. As Benton points out, it’s been possible to get the Wall Street Journal for free for years, but most people don’t go to the trouble.
It’s a balancing act for the Times. Make it too easy for operations like @FreeNYTimes to flourish and you undercut the revenue model of a subscription system that reportedly cost more than $30 million to build. Try to whack every mole and you end up employing armies of lawyers and people to track down violations. We’re sure there will be plenty more to report on this story.

It took The New York Times more than a year to design its paywall, and it took the rest of us about 24 hours to figure out ways around it. Ah, the wisdom of crowds.

The Times‘s paywall won’t go up in the U.S. until next week, but it’s already in full flower in Canada, where a programmer named David Hayes has come up with a bookmarklet that vaporizes the Javascript overlay that blocks a non-paying reader from accessing an article. Drag the “NYTClean” tool to your bookmark bar and click it when you want to read.Voilà. Read on to learn how it works.

The Times has also asked Twitter to disable an account someone created last week that uses the social media exemption in the paywall design to permit free access. The feed is called FreeNYTimes, but we don’t expect it to be around very long. The Times charges trademark infringement, which is pretty ridiculous, since someone will simply reconstitute the same idea under a different name. On the other hand, the Times had no alternative, since the account doesn’t violate any of its terms of service.

Joshua Benton dissects this emerging cat-and-mouse game, and also explains how Hayes’ workaround works. The Times chose a novel way to intercept and block visitors who exceed the limit of 20 free articles per month. Instead of denying them access to the content, the site covers the article with a Javascript overlay while leaving the full article visible but obscured in the background. Blocking Javascript is easy. In fact, browsers let you do it  by default. NYTClean basically strips some tags from the HTML source code that the browser sees so that the Javascript overlay doesn’t show.

The Twitter workaround is simpler and much tougher to prevent. It takes advantage of a unique provision in the Times‘ terms of service that permits links from social media sources to go around the paywall. The Times should be commended for acknowledging the importance of word-of-mouth marketing, but it also created a gaping hole in its revenue plan in the process.

Consider this: The entire contents of nytimes.com are available as RSS feeds, which presumably aren’t going away when the paywall goes up. Free services like Dlvr.it can take any RSS feed and deliver it through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Buzz and any number of other social outlets. All you have to do is purchase one free subscription, grab all the RSS feeds and syndicate them through the social network of your choice. Everyone in your circle can now share your subscription. That’s what @FreeNYTimes.com is doing. Anyone can do the same thing in about a half hour.

Which means that if the the Times’ sincerely wants to shut down rogue operations like @FreeNYTimes, it is buying into a giant whack-a-mole game. Except maybe the Times isn’t all that worried about those scallywags. Joshua Benton quotes Times executives as being concerned about violations, but not inclined to throw too many resources at preventing them. They say any preventive scheme will be defeated by a small number of geeks, but the vast majority of readers won’t go to the trouble of seeking out the workarounds. They’ll just shell out the $15-$35 per month. As Benton points out, it’s been possible to get the Wall Street Journal for free for years, but most people don’t go to the trouble.

It’s a balancing act for the Times. Make it too easy for operations like @FreeNYTimes to flourish and you undercut the revenue model of a subscription system that reportedly cost more than $30 million to build. Try to whack every mole and you end up employing armies of lawyers and people to track down violations. We’re sure there will be plenty more to report on this story.

We were so choked with joy to finally read details of The New York Times‘ paywall plan, which was announced yesterday, that we didn’t quite know what to say. So we’ll let others do the talking:
“This is how it will work, and what it means for you:

• On NYTimes.com, you can view 20 articles each month at no charge, [after which] we will ask you to become a digital subscriber.
• On our smartphone and tablet apps, the Top News section will remain free of charge. For all other sections, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber.
• The Times is offering three digital subscription packages that allow you to choose from a variety of devices.
• All home delivery subscribers will receive free access to NYTimes.com and to all content on our apps.
• Readers who come to Times articles through links will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit.
• The home page at NYTimes.com and all section fronts will remain free.”

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.

“On day one, at least, opinion on the web seems widely negative—although, perhaps it’s just that the angriest people are the ones that we tend to hear from first? The Guardian, whose management has long defended the free-for-all model, is conducting a poll on its website, asking readers about the Times online, ‘Will you become a subscriber?’ I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised that the ‘No, I’ll read my 20 free articles and move on’ would get a whopping 93 percent, with only 7 percent (as of this writing) voting for ‘Yes, its news and opinion are a must-have.’”

Columbia Journalism Review

“It’s a high price, a gamble, and a big hedge…against print subscribers migrating too quickly to the tablet. Since it is not charging print subs, it’s going to be an uphill battle to get non-print people to pay a minimum of $195 a year for something that was free, and it eschews conventional wisdom that $9.95 a month is a consumer limit on many digital items. The lack of an annual offer is glaring, and makes it far less friendly to expense accounts for business readers.”

Ken Doctor on Nieman

“An apparent (and likely very purposeful) loophole in The New York Times paywall plans: At least two of the newspaper’s home delivery subscription packages—which also come with unlimited access to the NYTimes.com website and apps—are cheaper than the “all digital access” subscription package.”

PaidContent.org

“This won’t work.”

Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing

“I suspect twenty free stories is too high, particularly when combined with the porous backdoor from social media. But it’s better to start off high and then gradually adjust it as the data comes in and you see what the effect is. And that’s a key thing to remember here: This is just a start.”

Columbia Journalism Review

“Nobody disputes the assertion that the Times cannot survive without increasing its revenues. Because I need the Times in my life—to read and to bitch about—I have no problem with the paper ejecting as many free-riders as necessary and soaking as many of the habituated (you’re looking at one) to make the paper prosper. So as we pick the mortar from the paywall and heave the loose bricks over the top at the Times noggins, keep this in mind: The pricing scheme and process by which the paper evicts its millions of squatters doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to increase revenues appreciably.”

Jack Shafer on Slate

“There’s a great big hole in that wall that the Times doesn’t mention in its FAQ or press release. According to sources close to the situation, the 20-story limit can be breached if you access the site from multiple devices, and/or if you delete your cookies. In other words, suppose you hit the wall on your PC. Then move to your laptop, where you’ll get another 20 stories. Delete your cookies on any computer, and the clock goes back to zero.”

Bill Grueskin on PaidContent.org

“We believe at least 500,000 people (or more than 10 percent of those heavy users) may be willing to pay up—and here’s how we get to that number…”

PaidContent.org

“Let’s say that realistically the NYT is going after a universe of no more than 800,000 people that it’s going to ask to subscribe. And let’s be generous and say that 15% of them do so, paying an average of $200 per year apiece. That’s extra revenues of $24 million per year. [That] is a minuscule amount for the New York Times company as a whole; it’s dwarfed not only by total revenues but even by those total digital advertising revenues of more than $300 million a year. This is what counts as a major strategic move within the NYT?”

Felix Salmon on Retuers

“We asked some of our favorite media thinkers…to weigh in on the model’s pricing, packaging, and more. (Also asked: Are you going to subscribe?) Here are reactions from Steven Brill, Steve Buttry, David Cohn, Anil Dash, Jason Fry, Dan Kennedy, Martin Langeveld, Megan McCarthy, Geneva Overholser, Jonathan Stray, and Amy Webb. And please do share your own thoughts and reactions, as well.”

Nieman Journalism Lab

Poynter’s Julie Moos aggregates some of the best tweets from journalists and people in Canada, where the paywall will be tested first.

“The New York Times communications staff emailed out this slide deck to media writing about their new paywall plan. (And trust me, we’ve been writing about it.) The deck lays out the basics of the plan, but also gives an idea of the pitch is meant to read to advertisers and investors, not just readers.”

Nieman Journalism Lab

“How about this, New York Times: You bring back the ‘On Language’ column, and I’ll take out a digital subscription.”

John McIntyre

Readers who come to Times articles through Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. A new Twitter account has been set up with the apparent intention of making most or all of the nytimes.com website available this way: @FreeNYT Everywhere

“[The plan is encouraging] for two main reasons: firstly, it recognizes the importance of distribution in online publishing. If you erect an arbitrary paywall, many people will not bother to link to you because they don’t want to frustrate their friends….Secondly, it recognizes that they need to balance quality with quantity. Online advertising has yet to settle into any sort of pattern, but metrics of engagement are rising in importance, and one of those metrics is how much traffic comes from recommendations, i.e. social media.”

Online Journalism Blog

“From my office in Cambridge, I created a new dummy nytimes.com account and logged onto a Canadian proxy — a server that allows you to appear to a website to be coming from somewhere you aren’t. Then I went a-click-click-clickin’ all over nytimes.com, hoping to run into the 20 article limit. When I hit No. 20, this popped up in the lower-left corner of my browser window:”

Joshua Benton on Nieman

Respected journalist James Fallows (right) could be excused for scolding new media entities like Gawker for trivializing the news and playing to its audience’s most base instincts. He could also be forgiven for mourning the emergence of “truthiness” as a substitute for fact in an Internet-driven culture that has become more concerned with immediacy that accuracy. Yet Fallows does neither of these things in a thoughtful and well-sourced 8,000-word piece in this month’s Atlantic entitled Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media.
In fact, Fallows drops in on Gawker founder Nick Denton and spends time learning to appreciate a scene in which reporters compete to repost the most salacious and bizarre stories about celebrities and the weirdness around us. Their progress is tracked by big-screen TVs that display real-time traffic to the company’s properties, which include Gizmodo, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Deadspin, Gawker and others. Writers do almost no primary sourcing, but mainly dig around the Web for nuggets posted by others. They’re rewarded based upon the number of first-time visitors they attract.
Denton is unapologetic about his model, which has turned the art of story selection and headline writing into an analytical science. He’s giving people what they want, and if you have a problem with that, go elsewhere.
Which kind of sums up Fallows’ conclusions about the state of new media. Upon considering input from experts ranging from Tom Brokaw to Jeff Jarvis, his conclusions are basically that the world is what it is and we will have to figure this stuff out. On the one hand, we’re giving up the luxury of knowing that the news reaches us has been vetted  by professional journalists. On the other, we are getting a whole lot more information than we used to get. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We have to figure out how to do less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff.
The piece bristles with great quotes. “Everything is documented, and little of it is edited. Editing is one of the great inventions of civilization,” says Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard and the author of the recent The Whites of Their Eyes.
Artificial intelligence pioneer Jaron Lanier, author of Digital Maoism, adds, “We have created a technology that has wonderful potential, but that enormously increases our ability to lie to ourselves and forget it is a lie. We are going to need to develop new conventions and formalities to cut through the lies.”
Fallows resists the urge to pass judgment on what is right and wrong about new media. He sees some merit to Gawker’s lowbrow model, praises Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for inventing a new approach to journalism and even gives Fox News a pass for at least being honest about what it is.
He also dips into historical analogy to make a case that the media world has never been very stable. For example, Time and Newsweek were Depression-era experiments that were given little hope of success in their early days. National Public Radio didn’t exist during the Johnson administration. Television trivialized news, but it also gives us great shared experiences like the Apollo moon landing. All of these institutions were ridiculed in their early days because they broke with the way information had traditionally been delivered.
We are breaking the mold again, Fallows sums up, and very little can be done about it. So let’s look for virtue in new models and try to minimize our losses.
“I am biased in favor of almost any new project, since it might prove to be the next New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, NPR, or Wired that helps us understand our world,” he concludes. “Perhaps we have finally exhausted the viable possibilities for a journalism that offers a useful and accurate perspective.”

Miscellany

Alan Mutter asks “Will classified advertising come back?” The short answer: No. The people who used to buy real estate, automotive and recruitment advertising have found new and more-efficient channels and simply moved on, Mutter says. He has some interesting stats about newspaper classifieds:

• Recruitment advertising is down 85% since 2005
• Real estate advertising is off 76% in the same period
• Automotive is down 73%

Not only has that business permanently migrated elsewhere, the Newsosaur writes, but the one bright spot in the newspaper classified picture – legal advertising – is likely to shrivel as the economy improves and foreclosure and bankruptcy notices disappear. You can’t win for losing.

Matt Waite (left), who was the primary developer behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact fact-checking application at the St. Petersburg Times, comments on the reluctance of news organizations to embrace meaningful change with extraordinary clarity.
The daily newspaper is the result of a finely tuned process in which each component must perform exactly as expected or else there’s hell to pay, Waite says. This process has been developed over the course of the last 150 years and is embedded into every aspect of the newspaper culture. Whatever you do, don’t mess with the production system.
This is why newspaper websites continue to be little more than digital versions of their print products. Process is so important that publishers can’t imagine doing things any other way. Waite notes that while innovative applications have emerged at many newspapers, they all exist on separate servers outside of the production system. These ideas won’t go mainstream – and news organizations won’t change what they do – until technologies like map mashups, real-time updates and crowdsourced fact-checking are integrated into the content management system. That will happen slowly, if it happens at all, he writes on Nieman Journalism Lab. A culture that is so hidebound by process is not one that sparks innovation.

Perhaps Mozilla can provide an answer. The organization that created the Firefox browser, among other things, has partnered with Knight Foundation on a fellowship program that will deliver 15 technologists to major newspapers to develop “new, adaptive tools for the future.” The idea is that these fellows won’t be simply hired hands, but will bring innovative ideas based upon open source concepts like sharing and assimilation of other applications. They will spend the next three years working with some major newspapers on projects that will be available to anyone.
 

Respected journalist James Fallows (right) could be excused for scolding new media entities like Gawker for trivializing the news and playing to its audience’s most base instincts. He could also be forgiven for mourning the emergence of “truthiness” as a substitute for fact in an Internet-driven culture that has become more concerned with immediacy that accuracy. Yet Fallows does neither of these things in a thoughtful and well-sourced 8,000-word piece in this month’s Atlantic entitled Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media.

In fact, Fallows drops in on Gawker founder Nick Denton and spends time learning to appreciate a scene in which reporters compete to repost the most salacious and bizarre stories about celebrities and the weirdness around us. Their progress is tracked by big-screen TVs that display real-time traffic to the company’s properties, which include Gizmodo, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Deadspin, Gawker and others. Writers do almost no primary sourcing, but mainly dig around the Web for nuggets posted by others. They’re rewarded based upon the number of first-time visitors they attract.

Denton is unapologetic about his model, which has turned the art of story selection and headline writing into an analytical science. He’s giving people what they want, and if you have a problem with that, go elsewhere.

Which kind of sums up Fallows’ conclusions about the state of new media. Upon considering input from experts ranging from Tom Brokaw to Jeff Jarvis, his conclusions are basically that the world is what it is and we will have to figure this stuff out. On the one hand, we’re giving up the luxury of knowing that the news reaches us has been vetted  by professional journalists. On the other, we are getting a whole lot more information than we used to get. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We have to figure out how to do less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff.

The piece bristles with great quotes. “Everything is documented, and little of it is edited. Editing is one of the great inventions of civilization,” says Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard and the author of the recent The Whites of Their Eyes.

Artificial intelligence pioneer Jaron Lanier, author of Digital Maoism, adds, “We have created a technology that has wonderful potential, but that enormously increases our ability to lie to ourselves and forget it is a lie. We are going to need to develop new conventions and formalities to cut through the lies.”

Fallows resists the urge to pass judgment on what is right and wrong about new media. He sees some merit to Gawker’s lowbrow model, praises Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for inventing a new approach to journalism and even gives Fox News a pass for at least being honest about what it is.

He also dips into historical analogy to make a case that the media world has never been very stable. For example, Time and Newsweek were Depression-era experiments that were given little hope of success in their early days. National Public Radio didn’t exist during the Johnson administration. Television trivialized news, but it also gives us great shared experiences like the Apollo moon landing. All of these institutions were ridiculed in their early days because they broke with the way information had traditionally been delivered.

We are breaking the mold again, Fallows sums up, and very little can be done about it. So let’s look for virtue in new models and try to minimize our losses.

“I am biased in favor of almost any new project, since it might prove to be the next New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, NPR, or Wired that helps us understand our world,” he concludes. “Perhaps we have finally exhausted the viable possibilities for a journalism that offers a useful and accurate perspective.”

Miscellany

Alan Mutter asks “Will classified advertising come back?” The short answer: No. The people who used to buy real estate, automotive and recruitment advertising have found new and more-efficient channels and simply moved on, Mutter says. He has some interesting stats about newspaper classifieds:

• Recruitment advertising is down 85% since 2005
• Real estate advertising is off 76% in the same period
• Automotive is down 73%

Not only has that business permanently migrated elsewhere, the Newsosaur writes, but the one bright spot in the newspaper classified picture – legal advertising – is likely to shrivel as the economy improves and foreclosure and bankruptcy notices disappear. You can’t win for losing.

Matt Waite (left), who was the primary developer behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact fact-checking application at the St. Petersburg Times, comments on the reluctance of news organizations to embrace meaningful change with extraordinary clarity.

The daily newspaper is the result of a finely tuned process in which each component must perform exactly as expected or else there’s hell to pay, Waite says. This process has been developed over the course of the last 150 years and is embedded into every aspect of the newspaper culture. Whatever you do, don’t mess with the production system.

This is why newspaper websites continue to be little more than digital versions of their print products. Process is so important that publishers can’t imagine doing things any other way. Waite notes that while innovative applications have emerged at many newspapers, they all exist on separate servers outside of the production system. These ideas won’t go mainstream – and news organizations won’t change what they do – until technologies like map mashups, real-time updates and crowdsourced fact-checking are integrated into the content management system. That will happen slowly, if it happens at all, he writes on Nieman Journalism Lab. A culture that is so hidebound by process is not one that sparks innovation.

Perhaps Mozilla can provide an answer. The organization that created the Firefox browser, among other things, has partnered with Knight Foundation on a fellowship program that will deliver 15 technologists to major newspapers to develop “new, adaptive tools for the future.” The idea is that these fellows won’t be simply hired hands, but will bring innovative ideas based upon open source concepts like sharing and assimilation of other applications. They will spend the next three years working with some major newspapers on projects that will be available to anyone.