Four hundred fifty−five dollars is no pittance. But as of yesterday, that is the amount of money per year one has to pay to read The New York Times across all digital platforms. Subscriptions start at $15 every four weeks, $195 a year, for website and smartphone access and jump to $35 every four weeks, $455 a year, for unlimited website, smartphone and tablet access. Compare this to The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, two other news giants that charge for digital access, whose price tags come in at $207 and $110, respectively, for yearly access. There is no doubt that the Times is asking for a large amount of money for access to its content, but it is a price worth paying, and the newspaper is taking a logical step.
The Times is putting out what is arguably the best content in its history and its website is among the best on the web. Still, while it remains for many of us simply a bookmark on our toolbar, the Times is ultimately a business. Like any other business, it has expenses to take into account and employees to pay. Owing largely to the online revolution of the past decade, consumers have come to expect nearly all online content to be free, even as print advertising revenues have fallen drastically. There is clearly a chasm here, and the Times has taken a rational step toward bridging it.
A starting price tag of $195 a year seems, at first, to be excessively hefty. It is on the higher end of most other media organizations, especially when one considers that it does not cover all platforms. The idea of paying today for something that was free yesterday is arresting, but it represents a necessary shift in Internet culture.
The era of universally free Internet content is certainly appealing but unquestionably unsustainable. No one expects a doctor or lawyer to offer his or her services free of charge, and neither should we expect that of journalists. For all the hype of citizen reporting, professional journalists offer a level of expertise as vital to the fabric of our society as any other vocation. Amateur YouTube videos from Libya may give a scattered snapshot of the situation on the ground, but it is only with professional journalists that we can learn about relatives looking for missing relatives in Ajdabiya, government propaganda and crackdowns in Tripoli or Col. Muammar Qaddafi's money laundering — all Times articles from the past several days. Journalists are not charity−workers.
The Times has left open a number of loopholes in its paywall. Readers can access 20 articles per month for free. And even after those 20, they will be able to read a limited number of full articles if they click through a link found on a search engine, blog or social medium, like Facebook. This is a tacit admission by the Times that it cannot charge for the breaking news readers can find anywhere on the Web. But the newspaper offers content almost unparalleled in scope and quality, and its owners have rightfully concluded that theirs is a product worth paying for, no matter what medium readers use to access it.
We live in an era of instant gratification, where most people think that a few clicks of a mouse is all they need to find important information. Unfortunately, times are tough, especially for journalistic organizations, and that expectation is no longer sustainable. It is unrealistic to think that everything one can find online is going to be free simply by nature of its being online.
The Times' paywall may be annoying, but the reality of the situation is simple: It is a necessity.
