Right now, nine of the top ten searches at
Technorati website are New York Times Columnists or Columns.
- Nickleback
- "Maureen Dowd"
- John Tierney: Human Bei...
- "Find The Brownie"
- "Thomas Friedman"
- "Dancing In The Dark"
- "Paul Krugman"
- "David Brooks"
- "John Tierney"
- "Human Beings 2.0"
So has the New York Times screwed themselves over with their new TimesSelect. The Columnists were once the kings and queens of the Most Emailed Articles, but now are gone. Surprise!
Now if Technorati is getting bombarded by folks looking for the columns, that should be a sign that people are looking for the voices of these columnists. It looks like TimesSelect may have the opposite effect that the Times wanted. People are leaving the NYTimes.com site, to look elsewhere for the columns.
Editor & Publisher questioned the whole pay-per-view approach -
Now, up front let me say that I like the overall thrust of this initiative -- but I'm skeptical of one major component, putting the paper's immensely popular and well-read Op-Ed columnists behind the paid wall. After talking to some of the key players at the Times and some industry observers, though, I'm now a bit more willing to believe it might work. But I'm not yet quite ready to bet on that.
...
He's looking for significant numbers. The goal won't be met with TimesSelect subscription numbers in the tens of thousands, Nisenholtz says; it needs to be in the hundreds of thousands in the early years, and even more over the long term.
...
One factor that Nisenholtz thinks will encourage people to pay to keep reading the Op-Ed crew is the nation of the "Times loyalist" -- perhaps 1.5 million to 2 million readers who are devoted to the New York Times brand, and spend significantly more time reading NYTimes.com than they do other news sites. With them, he claims, their willingness to fork over "the equivalent to buying a few martinis" for an annual subscription could be expected. His hypothesis is that this loyal audience base can be persuaded to spend money on the NYT brand on the Web, just as it long has in print.
However, I agree with Jay Rosen and a George Mason jouralism student -
"Steve Klein, an online journalism professor at George Mason University, says one of his students raised an excellent point during a class discussion this week about TimesSelect: `Even if the Times picked up most of its existing online readers, how are they going to grow a new generation of online Op-Ed readers if they keep the columnists behind a pay firewall?' Good question."
Yes indeed a very good question. How will the New York Times and their columnists influence the next generation if they are behind a firewall?
Maybe the answer to this is already around us. Look at where you are reading this at - DailyKos, the biggest blog in the world. Maybe blogging will fill in the gap that the New York Times has decided to remove itself from. Maybe this is just another transformation in to the new media. Maybe Kos and Josh Marshall will become the new Paul Krugman and Frank Rich. Who knows.
That I am a subscriber to the Times, I automatically got access to TimesSelect, but I think that the Times screwed themselves with this venture.