What Would You Pay to Access NYTimes.com?

The New York Times is surveying subscribers to determine if they'd be willing to pay $5 a month to access content on its NYTimes.com Website, which is currently free of charge. The newspaper is also testing a 50 percent discount scheme ($2.50/month) for those who retain their home-delivery print subscription.

Read reports from Bloomberg, Poynter, and Paid Content.

Our question: What if all online videojournalism and multimedia (and of course advertising) was offered free of charge, and you had to pay to access the rest of a newspaper's online content (text, images)?

What if newspapers invested sufficient resources to create topnotch video stories as an inducement to lure viewers through the front door, and then required them to pay to visit all the other rooms in the media castle? Videojournalism, after all, is their most customized (and least easily duplicated) editorial asset.

That would build a substantial audience for all those currently neglected and underappreciated video stories -- which, to our thinking, is the storytelling form that best maximizes the Web medium's strengths.

CJR Does the Math: Kindle Doesn't Add Up

The Columbia Journalism Review did the math and demonstrated that there's no way that Amazon's Kindle DX is going to save the newspaper industry -- corroborating our previous thoughts on the subject.

Then CJR re-did the math the next day, taking into account the previously overlooked fact that a whopping seventy percent of revenues will go to Amazon and also to the wireless service that powers the whole concept ... and found that the results were even more dire than they had calculated. If a reader pays $14/month, the newspaper pockets only $4.20 of that.

CJR also factored in a Bloomberg report about a visionary Knight Ridder experiment conducted in 1992, designed to culminate in its own portable newspaper-reading device intended to boost readership and revenues. After three years, the project fizzled and the 10-person lab was shut down.

A key flaw in the Kindle plan is the absence of any way to display full-color non-text advertising -- a necessary source of revenue. But others are undeterred.

Gannett Co., which stopped home delivery of its Detroit Free Press four days a week, said it will distribute the newspaper on another e-reader being developed by Plastic Logic Ltd. ... Hearst Corp., which owns the Houston Chronicle, also invested in a company developing a reader.

[But] the Kindle just looks like another way for newspapers to turn profitable customers into unprofitable ones.

Columbia J-School Panel: Future of Newspapers

Last week's panel discussion on journalism trends and the future of print media included Columbia J-School Prof. James B. Stewart; Steve Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers; and Norman Pearlstine, chief content officer of Bloomberg.



Stewart is the author of eight books, and writes "Common Sense," a column in SmartMoney and SmartMoney.com, which also appears in the Wall Street Journal. He contributes regularly to The New Yorker and was formerly Page One Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Stewart is the recipient of a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Wall Street Journal articles on the 1987 stock market crash and the insider trading scandal. He is also the winner of the George Polk award and two Gerald Loeb awards.

Swartz is president of Hearst Newspapers. Under his leadership, SmartMoney won two National Magazine Awards and was named Magazine of the Year by Advertising Age. Under Swartz’s leadership, Hearst played a key role in founding the newspaper industry's consortium with Yahoo!, launching the industry's partnership with the online real estate company Zillow, and forming quadrantONE, a national online sales network co-owned by Hearst, The New York Times Company, Gannett and Tribune.

Pearlstine previously served as a senior advisor to Time Warner, following 11 years as editor in chief of the company's Time Inc. subsidiary. Before joining Time Inc., Pearlstine worked for the Wall Street Journal from 1968 to 1992, except for a two-year period from 1978-1980 when he worked as an executive editor of Forbes magazine. In 1992, Pearlstine resigned from the Journal to work at SmartMoney magazine. Pearlstine has been honored with the National Press Foundation's Editor of the Year Award; the Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism; the American Society of Magazine Editors Lifetime Achievement Award; and induction into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame.