Tibor On The New York Times' Paywall
Tibor Machan blogs about the meeting of The New York Times and property rights:
Well, suddenly The New York Times no longer makes it possible for online readers to offer comments easily-to do so one must climb over several walls, email letters to the editor, etc., etc. And reading the comments of other readers is no longer possible (or if it is then it is by no means as simple as it used to be). In other words, The New York Times is making changes, most likely to save money or to avoid having to deal with contrarians among its online readers. I don't actually know what lies behind the changes but I do not like them.However, and this is a notion that the editors and publishers at The Times probably do not appreciate at all, the paper belongs to them and they have the authority-based on the right to private property-to institute the changes however much I and very probably a bunch of other readers do not like them. We are not entitled to the provision of various services from The Times, such as accepting comments from readers, notifying us that the comments have appeared online, etc., and so forth. The paper belongs to them not me and others whose desires are no longer being fulfilled as they used to be. Something has changed at The Times and the publishers and editors there have the right to make the needed adjustments just as they see fit. They do not owe me and others like me a platform for expressing our dismay with what appears in the pages of the paper. Yes, we may wish for this very much. We may even have become habituated to offering up our ideas for the editors and readers to ponder. But that doesn't entitle us one whit to being given room in the pages of The Times.
Only, the publishers and editors and most Op Ed contributors to the paper just don't get it-they are exercising a right that they do not recognize for other people, such as those who do not want to contribute funds the Mr. Obama's health care budget or who do not want to follow mandates to which they gave no consent! These editors and publishers just decided, unilaterally, to close me and thousands of others out from the forums they could continue to keep open to us all. And they probably don't even realize that this right, this authority they have to do so, is entirely inconsistent with their welfare statist public philosophy.
No, I and others like me do not have a right to gain entrance to the pages of The New York Times, in print or online. And the folks at The Times know this well and good and act accordingly. They didn't need my permission to shut me out. It was their right to make that decision.
Which is central to human freedom, based on the right to private property, a right The Times doesn't much like and certainly doesn't defend in its editorials.
Great cite/link/share.
We will all agree that the publishers of the NYT, just like almost every other old media enterprise, have no special insight on how to make money in the internet age. That's not a taunt! Most of the rest of us don't either. (I work in television. Do you remember television? It was very popular! This was before Brittney.)
Machan doesn't say it out loud, but this can happen to almost every industry with established players. Someone gets antsy and decides to make changes.
Sometimes there are good reasons, like when the Denver & Seattle newspapers simply closed up shop for lack of profits.
Sometimes companies make minor adjustments to accommodate new conditions. I once read that Wal-Mart was moving slowly but deliberately into the online game. Maybe they now wish they were Amazon, but they knew better than to jeopardize the most profitable brick & mortar venture on the planet.
Sometimes companies get antsy... An executive tries to be clever, or someone reads some bad research, and you get New Coke. (If you're old enough to remember that, raise your hand.)
(Another favorite example is the pop band that has three hit albums, then takes a year off to "get their [22-year-old] heads together, [man]." They come back with a new record called "Please Take Me Seriously" jacketed in an unsmiling, black-&-white portrait, featuring the single "My Supermodel Married a Bond Trader." Then Gaga eats their lunch, and that includes two shows at the Ohio State Fair.)
But it doesn't matter whether the reasons for change are good or bad, and there's nothing much or us to do about it. Everyone reading these words has enjoyed some commercial product that was changed by the manufacturer and then you didn't like it as much. An ugly model year for a coupé, a new actor on a sitcom, or cheap parts on a musical instrument, and your interest evaporates.
We shouldn't be too resentful when this happens on the internet, where so much of the value is thrown at us for free anyway. But...
(more)
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at August 11, 2012 1:22 AM
But many people WILL be resentful, unlike Machan.
This week I've seen contrasting articles about internet commentary:
&(You'll never guess to which sentiment I align.)(Note also that the word "toxic" is in title of the first item and is nearly mocked within the body of the second.)
Newspaper publishers have spent their lives with minimally intimate feedback from readers. Especially at a paper like the New York Times, they're probably a little sensitive to the nasty things that have been said about them online in the last few yeas.
And this change is going to bring a whole lot more grim chatter from people who don't want to pay for the service the NYT has been bringing to them at no charge.
Aside from the larger incoherence Machan describes, there will be two interesting things to look for after this. First, whether the tone or quality of the NYT's coverage changes as this part of their readership (the cheap man-on-the-street) is no longer offering its voice to them. Second, whether the backlash causes them to change course, or accelerates their withdrawal from less profitable interactions with readers. Either path at the fork in the road could go either direction.
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at August 11, 2012 1:25 AM
("Direction" meaning profitable or not profitable. Care to wager?)
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at August 11, 2012 1:52 AM
I'm guessing the New York Slimes is going to die a slow, ignominious death.
The paper has been left leaning for decades. The number of cases of bad reporting seems to be increasing. Putting up a paywall or other obstacles to counter opinions will just leave them more isolated and less relevant.
Jim P. at August 11, 2012 6:53 AM
Sites that allow comments and allow people to see the comments easily get a lot more of my page views than sites that have no comments enabled.
Page views for advertisers is the goal, right?
nonegiven at August 11, 2012 7:33 AM
My local paper is completely internet-impaired. Everything they do online, they do badly. They are slow to report, they are error-filled (with factual, spelling and grammar errors), and worst of all, they switched to a facebook login for commentary. You must have a facebook account and use it to leave comments. And they delete any comments that are not from a "real name" account. And.. (argh!) they have scrolling ads and banners all over the pages that move across the stories. Every time I see one I see another company that I absolutely refuse to patronize.
I commented once there and got weirdoes messaging me. I am not allowed any privacy or protection from ass hats so I no longer comment there. At all. Full stop. The facebook commentary dealie is also incredibly slow to load. So if I want to read the comments, it takes sometimes 4 or 5 minutes for them to load. And I have broadband!
They also delete a lot of comments that don't abide by their "online community" guidelines.
Idjits.
LauraGr at August 11, 2012 7:52 AM
At one time, our mid-size town actually had two competing papers. One had a slightly left-leaning centrist editorial outlook, and the other was pretty hard left. Well, there was a merger, and I don't know how it happened, but the editorial staff of the far-left paper wound up in charge. From there, circulation started to drop. This all happened in the mid-1990s, before the Internet was a big thing.
Well, circulation has since then dropped so horrendously that the paper recently undertook these measures: First of all, they have cut back to three issues a week. Second, they shut down the paper's printing plant, and contracting printing to an out-of-town service, which means that by the time the paper hits the racks here, the news is a day old. They, of course, blame all of this on the Internet.
Cousin Dave at August 11, 2012 10:10 AM
> Page views for advertisers is the goal, right?
Yes, but...
Who knows? The world is full of entitled-feeling consumers who want to tell their vendors how to make money, even when they have no clue how the business works. (And even when they pay nothing for the product.) We all do it as children —
orMost of us grow out of it at some point. Not only do we not have the authority to tell people how to make money when we're wrong and they're right, we don't have that authority when we're right and they're wrong.Who knows what metrics the NYT has decided to watch? Who knows what those metrics mean? Maybe the NYT guys are looking to take over the candy corn industry, or maybe they're going after Amazon.
Somewhere in the flurry of reportage and remembrance last fall, there was an anecdote about Steve Jobs receiving suggestions for a new product line[!] from an intrusive boor after a handshake on an elevator. It was pretty wack, and not just a refinement to an existing product. I can't even remember what the product was or even what decade it happened in.
Maybe "You should do a new Macintosh, waterproof-certified to 30' with LED lamps on the back edge to illuminate scuba dives!" or "You should make a printer that automatically kicks out the New York Times business section before the guy even turns it on in the morning, and circles the articles about the PGA tour!"
We imagine Steve looking back at the guy (a drafting teacher at a community college, or a specialist in European municipal bonds) as his entourage cringes in the background. Steve Jobs was cutting bloodthirsty deals with the microchip manufacturers when other guys were in their second year of college. "The PGA, huh?"
"Oh, I love the links!," says the bond trader. "And I just think you'd make a really good product like that."
Markets, design and suppliers are not on most people's radar. The reality of other human beings is not on most people's radar.
Machan, like any genuine libertarian, feels this in his bones, so he wasn't so explicit about it in his post.
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at August 11, 2012 10:01 PM
Leave a comment