How to Get Around the New York Times Paywall, a 49 Second Tutorial

The one sentence summary: Go to the article you’d like to read and delete everything in the address bar from the question mark onward.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

If you’re the New York Times, it should kicking in exactly right now.

For those who blast past the monthly limit of free articles and are feeling a little light in the wallet, might we recommend following @FreeNYT’s Firehose list?

The list aggregates the Twitter streams of various NYT writers and departments. Since the company’s current policy is that social media links to their content will not count against the monthly meter, you can read away for free.

Want to see to see the list laid out more like a newspaper? Try viewing it on Paper.li.

Image Source: ClikServ.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

A wholly unscientific view of the New York Time’s paywall that will launch later this month.

Information comes from Felix Salmons’ commentary in Wired, and an earlier news article from Bloomberg.  

First things first: we’re a bit gobsmacked that it cost $40-50 million to implement this solution. Yes, there are a lot of moving parts, and yes, they’ve spent over a year planning this move… but $40-50 million?

Second, total digital advertising revenue runs north of $300 million. This is relies on the New York Times’ 33 million unique monthly visitors. The meter the Times has established is to prevent those uniques from dropping but like all implementations before it, it most likely will.

So the goal here is to increase subscription revenue faster than advertising revenue decreases. 

Third, Here’s where Salmons’ number crunching gets interesting (emphasis ours):

[H]ow much revenue will the paywall bring in? A very large number of the paper’s most loyal readers are already print subscribers, and get access to the website at no extra cost. So the new revenues from the paywall will only come from people who read the website a lot but who don’t subscribe in print.

How many of those people are there? Emily Bell reckons that the number of people who’ll even hit the paywall in the first place is only about 5% of the NYT’s 33 million or so unique visitors. That’s 1.6 million people — compare the 1.3 million people who already subscribe to the paper on Sundays. The former is not a perfect superset of the latter, of course, but there’s a big overlap; let’s say that realistically the NYT is going after a universe of no more than 800,000 people that it’s going to ask to subscribe. And let’s be generous and say that 15% of them do so, paying an average of $200 per year apiece. That’s extra revenues of $24 million per year.

$24 million is a minuscule amount for the New York Times company as a whole; it’s dwarfed not only by total revenues but even by those total digital advertising revenues of more than $300 million a year.

The race begins March 28.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Q: Can I still access NYTimes.com articles through Facebook, Twitter, Google or my blog?

A: Yes. We encourage links from Facebook, Twitter, search engines, blogs and social media. When you visit NYTimes.com through a link from one of these channels, that article (or video, slide show, etc.) will count toward your monthly limit of 20 free articles, but you will still be able to view it even if you’ve already read your 20 free articles.

When you visit NYTimes.com by clicking links in Google search results, you’ll enjoy up to five free articles per day.

Go that? The NYT is trying to create more of a semi-permeable membrane than a strict, walled garden.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Designer Paul May created “From Over Here”, a project that physically represents all stories in the New York Times from 1992 to 2010 that mention Ireland.

Via Paul’s blog:

Each card represents a month of articles about, or related to Ireland. The size of the card represents the numbers of articles from that month. The people and topics mentioned in the articles are etched on each card.

Flickr Set. H/T: Core77.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Subsequently, Davis was arrested and charged with murder but the US government claimed he worked for the US Embassy and has diplomatic immunity.

Background, Part II: US media outlets reported the US government’s story, repeated claims that Davis served in some sort of diplomatic capacity, and while admitting the issue was cloudy, basically made the case that he could and should be freed.

Until, that is, the Guardian reported:

The American who shot dead two men in Lahore, triggering a diplomatic crisis between Pakistan and the US, is a CIA agent who was on assignment at the time.

To which the New York Times concurred, while adding:

The New York Times had agreed to temporarily withhold information about Mr. Davis’s ties to the agency at the request of the Obama administration, which argued that disclosure of his specific job would put his life at risk. Several foreign news organizations have disclosed some aspects of Mr. Davis’s work with the C.I.A.. On Monday, American officials lifted their request to withhold publication, though George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, declined any further comment.

Issue, Part I: Salon’s Glenn Greenwald claims that not only did the Times withhold information, but it also included information in their reporting that they knew to be false:

It’s one thing for a newspaper to withhold information because they believe its disclosure would endanger lives. But here, the U.S. Government has spent weeks making public statements that were misleading in the extreme — Obama’s calling Davis “our diplomat in Pakistan” — while the NYT deliberately concealed facts undermining those government claims because government officials told them to do so. That’s called being an active enabler of government propaganda.

Issue, Part II: So should news organizations have revealed that Davis was CIA?

The Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliot walks us through his news room’s decision to expose the connection, saying that newspapers are faced with such dilemmas all the time. They apply ethical tests, he writes, and live with the consequences.

Quoting David Katz, the paper’s deputy editor:

We came to the view that his CIA-ness was a critical part of the story, bound to be a factor in his trial or in attempts to have him released. The reasons we were given for not naming him were, firstly, that it may complicate his release – that is not our job. If he was held hostage other factors would kick in but he is in the judicial process. The other reason given by the CIA was that he would come to harm in prison.

The New York Times’ Public Editor Arthur Brisbane defends the newspaper’s actions, saying that news organizations don’t have standing to make life and death decisions.

As profoundly unpalatable as it is, I think the Times did the only thing it could do. Agreeing to the State Department’s request was a decision bound to bring down an avalanche of criticism and, even worse, impose serious constraints on The Times’s journalism. The alternative, though, was to take the risk that reporting the C.I.A. connection would, as warned, lead to Mr. Davis’s death.

In military affairs, there is a calculus that balances the loss of life against the gain of an objective. In journalism, though, there is no equivalent. Editors don’t have the standing to make a judgment that a story — any story — is worth a life. I find it hard to second-guess the editors’ assessment…

…It was a brutally hard call that, for some, damaged The Times’s standing. But to have handled it otherwise would have been simply reckless. I’d call this a no-win situation, one that reflects the limits of responsible journalism in the theater of secret war.

To report or not to report: Truthiness is a difficult gig.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

The New York TImes Magazine column “On Language” comes to a close after 32 years.

Says Ben Zimmer, the last columnist for the feature started by the curmudgeonly William Safire:

What does the future hold for our language? The great British language scholar David Crystal once warned me, “Never predict the future with language.” But it’s in our human nature to at least try. Lately I’ve been thinking about the language world that my 4-year-old son, Blake, will grow up into. Will English wax or wane in its global influence during his lifetime? Will the country’s demographic shifts demand a greater acceptance of multilingualism, and will there be a freer commingling of different speech varieties through what sociolinguists call “code-switching” and “code-mixing”? It may be an affront to those who uphold the sanctity of English as the national language, but heterogeneity looks as if it will increasingly be the name of the game.

One thing is clear, as I watch Blake make a Dr. Seuss book come alive on the family iPad with a casual swipe of the finger: Language will become more technologically mediated. The ever-expanding power and flexibility of our personal gadgets, combined with the computing prowess of servers we connect to in “the cloud,” makes it a dead certainty that tech will rule the language of even the most reluctant neo-Luddite.

Sad to know we’ll have to navigate elsewhere for our weekly dose of the cultured lexicon.

Meantime, the archive is here.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Some say an interview with ScribeMedia.org is the kiss of death.

In the past week Jeff Hayzlett, Chief Marketing Officer for Kodak, appeared with us and then announced he’s leaving the company. Then, we interview paidContent founder Rafat Ali days before he announces his departure from paidContent.org and ContentNext Media.

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Trust us, it’s a coincidence. Really, it is.

It’s just that a lot can happen in a week.

Rafat though comes through in a wide ranging interview that touches on a number of moving parts in the media ecosystem. This includes the Wall Street Journal’s existing subscription model and attempts by the paper to increase its reader base to a more general audience; the New York Times and its move toward their planned subscription model early next year; and a few pokes at news aggregators like the Huffington Post and Newser.

What we find interesting though are his thoughts on the iPad experience that come about halfway through the interview.

It’s not the savior of the magazine industry as some might hope, Rafat argues. “I think they will be disappointed at the end of the day.”

“I think it’s a little silly that adding interactive elements will make [a magazine] readable. If you don’t read it online, and don’t read it in print, you won’t read it on the iPad either.”

Instead, the device is better used for media consumption through applications like that created by Netflix.

At the end of the day, this may leave room for Amazon’s Kindle which Rafat calls “a more peaceful experience.”

Not that he expects the physical device to be the dedicated delivery system in the next few years. Instead, he expects the Kindle software to be everywhere, be it in a dedicated e-reader, mobile device or tablet.

Amazon is, after all, in the business of selling books, not in producing electronics.

Anyway, we wish Rafat well in his future endeavors and send him off with a kiss… of life.

About The Business of News and Devices with Rafat Ali

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

Serious. Think about that for a moment. As The Atlantic’s Michael Hirschorn speculates about the end of a debt-ridden New York Times, news continues that the mainstream media is cutting jobs, closing bureaus and generally trying to right their sinking ships, a blog network is sending people overseas to gather stories.

So while we doubt seasoned foreign correspondents are trembling in their boots that they’ll be out scooped, the anxiety continues with the penny counters upstairs as the blogosphere shows new and different ways to operate news (or “news”) organizations.