NY Times Confident Over Its Plan To Charge For Online Content

[engine]

NY Times Confident Over Its Plan To Charge For Online Content [news.yahoo.com]

Top New York Times executives expressed confidence Friday that a plan to start charging readers of the newspaper's website from next year will not result in a significant loss of traffic.

"We are, and have been for quite a long time, the largest newspaper-owned website in the world," said Martin Nisenholtz, the senior vice president for digital operations at the Times.

"We intend to remain the largest newspaper-owned website in the world," Nisenholtz said at "paidContent 2010,"

[wyweb]

will not result in a significant loss of traffic

I guess it all depends on how you define "significant."

[weeks]

I would guess this is going more or less like what WSJ did from the get-go.

But the headlines "New York Times Confident..." was amusing. If anything, NYT has always been "confident."

[Syzygy]

Of course they're 'confident'! They'd hardly go to a conference and announce that they were 'unsure', would they? LOL!

[weeks]

Well, Syzygy, it looks like they did go and announce they were unsure (but didn't mean to do it):

If (NYT) executives are not sure how it's going to all go down in 2011 (and that's Okay) then they should just stick to the script of what was already released. I'm not sure it was the best idea to make that announcement so early in the process either...
[fitzandjen.com...]

[BillyS]

Personally, I'm glad to see this happening. Less competition.

[jecasc]

The problem with newspapers online is this:

In the old days you subscribed to one or two newspapers which got delivered to your door step and then you read the newspaper from page one to the last page. The newspaper you subscribed to, pretty much had an information monopoly on you.

This is not how it works online. I read dozens of news articles everyday but not on one news site but across a dozen of national and international newspapers in three different languages. I could never afford to subscribe to all of them. And why should I pay for the whole newspaper when I only read one article? And sometimes not even one a day, but one in a week from a certain newspaper?

[Syzygy]

Thanks for the link, weeks. Fitz and Jen, whoever they are, need sacking as anyone writing so poorly whilst under the aegis of 'Editor & Publisher' is clearly not up to the job! :-)

However, they did reference comment about this uncertainty as described in Felix Salmon's Reuters blog. That's much more insightful and so for the benefit of the interested I provide the link here:

[blogs.reuters.com...]