The New York Times is, by the spring 2011, going to be charging for content. We don’t know yet if that means all content or some content, or all content some of the time, or some content all of the time.

I only know it’s a very bad thing.

You see, they really don’t need all those printing presses anymore. They really don’t need all those machinists and drivers and all those other dirty little jobs that used to be necessary when the method of presenting their product began with the killing of a tree.

It’s the economics, stupid.

Many newspapers failed to downshift into the new mode. Do you remember what happened to vinyl albums when CDs became popular? Vinyl was still available, but it was scarcer and more costly than before. In other words, if you had to have your vinyl you had to pay a premium. In the CD world, there were bargains galore as companies sought to ramp up their production to cost-effective levels, which they did in about 3 or 4 years. From 1982 to 1986 the world of recorded music changed absolutely and with hardly a murmur.

The Times, like other spectacular failures before them (including themselves: Remember TimesSelect?) have got the model backward. They are losing money hand over fist on the dead tree side of the business, and they believe that the way forward is to subsidize that by making us pay for the new, much cheaper method of delivery.

(a) Do they think we just fell off the turnip truck? We will still have access to news, even without the Times.

(b) What makes them think they can, now, get us to pay for something they’ve been providing, free, since 1996?

This is sheer desperation on the part of a dinosaur which is failing to adapt to its new environment. Surely the online side of the business is not the cause of the revenue drain. Surely the offenders in that regard are (a) decline in circulation, raising the cost of producing each copy; and (b) loss in advertiser dollars due to item (a) as well as more competition from the online world and a general slump in the consumer sector.

And their solution is to shoot themselves in the online heart?

Evidently, because talks are pretty far along. But does it make the slightest sense? No. Can it possibly succeed? No. Does it run the risk of destroying their online brand? Absolutely.

And yet, it still seems sure to happen.

And that’s why dinosaurs die.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.