New York Times to start meter ticking soon
March update on The New York Times progress on its plans to try to extract some income from online readers, originally planned for a January launch, eventually rescheduled to March 28.
The bottom line: The home delivery price still includes access to all digital versions. For the rest of us, NYTimes.com offers 20 free articles each calendar month as well as the Top News, home page, section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds. After that, the Times will want $15 every four weeks for unlimited access via Web and smartphone, $20 for tablets. (There’s promise of a “special introductory offer” on March 28, and some fine print about crosswords and e-reader editions.)
- Newsonomics of The New York Times Pay Fence — Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics, comments at Nieman Lab on the Times good timing: bringing its pay model online during the successful launch of the iPad2 “and a growing sense of the Times’ outsized importance as media chaos multiplies.”
- The Times Announces Digital Subscription Plan — (Jeremy W. Peters, NYT Business Day / Media & Advertising) — The New York Times introduced a plan on Thursday to begin charging the most frequent users of its Web site $15 for a four-week subscription in a bet that readers will pay for news they are accustomed to getting free. (March 17, 2011)
- Times Letter to Readers — About digital subscriptions. (March 17, 2011)
- The Times’s Online Pay Model Was Years in the Makng — (Jeremy W. Peters, NYT Business Day / Media & Advertising) — The New York Times’s online pay model, which takes effect on March 28, may be the most watched experiment in American journalism. (March 21, 2011)
- Paying for The Times at SXSW — (NYT Mediadecoder Blog) The New York Times, my employer, had just announced that it was about to implement a metered model, charging its most frequent visitors… March 20, 2011)
- Business News You Didn’t Read Here — NYT Public Editor Arthur Brisbane on other media outlets’ coverage of the Times plans to introduce a pay model for some of its online news. (March 5, 2011)
A new “national news brand” on iPad only
The word “newspaper” doesn’t show up in the “about” page text, but here’s Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad-specific litter-free daily, available by weekly or annual subscription through Apple’s App Store, The Daily.
The Daily launched on February 2, 2011 with the mission to provide the best news experience by combining world-class storytelling with the unique interactive capabilities of the iPad.
Led by Editor-in-Chief Jesse Angelo and Publisher Greg Clayman, The Daily is a category first: a tablet-native national news brand built from the ground up to publish original content exclusively for the iPad.
The Daily is incisive, optimistic, and independent. It’s not just an app—it’s a new voice. The Daily is offered exclusively in Apple’s iPad App Store and is available free for two weeks. It costs just 99 cents a week, or $39.99 a year.
More, from Macworld on YouTube and from The Daily’s first press release:
“New times demand new journalism,” said Mr. Murdoch. “So we built The Daily completely from scratch — on the most innovative device to come about in my time — the iPad.”
“The magic of great newspapers — and great blogs — lies in their serendipity and surprise, and the touch of a good editor,” continued Mr. Murdoch. “We’re going to bring that magic to The Daily — to inform people, to make them think, to help them engage in the great issues of the day. And as we continue to improve and evolve, we are going to use the best in new technology to push the boundaries of reporting.”
The Daily’s unique mix of text, photography, audio, video, information graphics, touch interactivity and real-time data and social feeds provides its editors with the ability to decide not only which stories are most important — but also the best format to deliver these stories to their readers.
“News Corp. is redefining the news experience with The Daily,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think it is terrific and iPad users are really going to embrace it.”
At http://thedaily.com there’s a walk-through for folks who don’t own an iPad. One page offers the concept in one-sentence: “The Daily has the depth and quality of a magazine, but is delivered daily like a newspaper and updated in real-time like the web.”
Its staff is drawn from a variety of newspaper, magazine and online careers. The editor in chief, Jesse Angelo, is executive editor of the New York Post, and will retain that title. A New Yorker and Harvard grad, he was a reporter for The Sun in London and the Daily Telegraph in Sydney before joining the Post.
News editor Mike Nizza has worked for The New York Times online, Atlantic Media Co.’s Innovation Center, and as editor in chief of AOL News.
The New York Times business section story on The Daily’s launch includes interesting details on costs, staffing and Murdoch’s deal with Apple. And, the Times calls it a “newspaper.”
Update:
(One critical reader says “The Daily” name itself is out of touch with the new medium, that it should be “The Moment” — “with rabid updates throughout the day.” I suspect rabid for rapid is a Freudian-Murdochian-Foxian slip.
If you’ve tried The Daily, feel free to add reviews or links to them below… Your mild-mannered webmaster is an Android user, at least until iPad 2 comes out.
