BusinessWeek and Reuters mention that the New York Times is “considering” moving to a pay-for-content model for their web-based news, though they’ve no immediate plans to do so. Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly comments :
For all the big talk in the blogosphere, if this happened it would pretty much spell the end of political blogging. Without a copious supply of online newspapers and magazines providing the raw material, there are very few bloggers who would have anything left to say.
I doubt that, though honestly I’m not sure it would be a bad thing if it happened. Riffing off my basic belief that the trend towards decentralized communication are too powerful for one company (or even one cartel) to reverse, I see one of two things happening should the NYT make such a move:
- Bloggers keep going just as before without the NYT, linking to other news sources that are still free or to AP or local paper stories that talk about the NYT articles rather than linking to the NYT directly. In the end this could damage the Times’ status as the paper of record for US online news-junkies, but they’d probably keep their reputation among the pros.
- Other news sources follow suit, and people start caching the pages directly and putting them online as “context for this quote.” Then people get fed up with how it takes 10 seconds to cut-and-paste a copy, and all new blogging software settles on extensions and interface paradigms that automatically make a local cache of anything you link to (ala the Cache plug-in for MovableType). Newspapers realize that people are still reading their content but now they’ve lost control of the frame, presentation and banner ads. They briefly consider pulling an RIAA and going all lawsuit crazy, but then realize that (a) unlike the recording industry their value is so time-critical that there are plenty of other ways to monetize their content, and (b) it’s generally bad to follow in the footsteps of a someone currently sinking in quicksand anyway.
Personally, my money’s on #2 happening regardless of what the Times does.