So who gave in and started to pay for their nytimes :p?

armchair_warrior

I reach my limit today and just paid LOL. I see if i could read more than 20 free pages a month or not, never count, till today.

bezierboy

Not going to happen for me. I will find any possible way around it including not reading the NY Times.

Huffingtonpost.com has the right attitude on this. They're blocking their content for everyone who comes from a NYTimes.com domain and no one else.

witch-king

This is a bit odd. $15 for full access isn't bad. It's not as if the people who do actual reporting, writing, editing of the news don't need to be paid. Huffington is an information parasite, a useful one, but parasitic nonetheless. The only reason it blocks the nyt domain is competitive, certainly not ethical.

jack krohn

Not me. I'll stop reading the NYT altogether before I so much as give them a penny.

sweet tea

i have my doubts this will work out for the times -- it didn't last time, if i recall -- but it is a bit cheap to begrudge paying even a little for content of real value that is not cheap to produce. huffpo is really not a fair comparison, in terms of production cost or quality.

that said, i hear lincoln (the car company) is giving free subscriptions to some people, so that might be worth looking into.

we have a weekend subscription to the actual paper (for the sake of the crossword, mostly, and the pleasure of a real sunday paper), which gives full access on all devices at a reasonable cost -- far less than a reasonable cost if you can in some way claim an educational discount.

booklaw

We subscribe to the NYT every day. Couldn't live without it. No other news source comes close.

boygabriel

Like the Onion said, I can't believe they want us to pay money for the product they put out.

sandcastler

Seems like the NYT will try *everything* except a really excellent comics page.

boygabriel

There are good print comics being produced these days?

sandcastler

Boygabriel said:

There are good print comics being produced these days?

exactly!

sandcastler

booklaw said:

We subscribe to the NYT every day. Couldn't live without it. No other news source comes close.

I guess. Right now Al Jazeera is reporting "Laurent Gbagbo, the incumbent president of Cote d'Ivoire, has been arrested by French forces from his bunker in Abidjan." While the NYT has nothing.

sandcastler

Oh, OK. Now they have it. Looks comprehensive. My apologies.

boygabriel

Since the great Run-up-the-Iraq-War hoax it's been hard for me to take any traditional media outlet seriously.

sandcastler

Boygabriel said:

Since the great Run-up-the-Iraq-War hoax it's been hard for me to take any traditional media outlet seriously.

I had a weird feeling on April 1 that half the stories I read were “April fools!” jokes.

sandcastler

(Turned out most of them weren’t.)

emily

HuffPo isn't a fair comparison--as far as I've read in it, it's a hybrid gossip rag and content farm. I think it's perfectly fair for the NYT to charge but I think they hit the price point wrong. If it were $5-8, like Netflix, I'd've paid it without thinking.

I feel like half my acquaintance was offered the Lincoln-sponsored subscription but not me. It can't be because those people read the newspaper more than I do, so I have drawn the conclusion that it's because they live in more desirable zipcodes. I changed my registration to my work address, but no offer. Maybe I missed the boat.

At any rate, the NYT seems to have taken a light-handed approach so far--it's very easy to circumvent the paywall so I haven't actually had to decide whether to defect to another paper or not. Just delete the end of the URL of the page asking you to pay, or clear your cookies.

sandcastler

I kept waiting for a doozy from the BBC — as is their wont — but in the end I could not figure out which one was the foolery.

sandcastler

Settled for re-watching their spaghetti harvest joke from long ago.

sluggo

I miss quality print news that provided objective reporting without countless grammatical and spelling errors and which cost 25 cents a copy. Also, Eugene T. Maleska's crossword puzzles.

Signed,

Grumpy Old Person

armchair_warrior

lol emily isn't it against laws to circumvent . anyway in my old days i would go very far to get a free meal but feels like they deserves the money after all this time.

hell I used to get their paper delivery to me since I was a kid, but when they went free in hs. I stop having the paper delivery.

walkathon

Accordig to PC World if you search for the article you want through Google you will get five free articles per day.

Can the New York Times Paywall Work?

Analysis: The permeable paywall returns March 28 for the most voracious readers.

By Harry McCracken, Technologizer PC World Mar 20, 2011

Fourteen months after announcing that it was going to begin charging for heavy use of its Web site, the New York Times has revealed the details and the deadline. Starting March 28, the newspaper will institute a $15 monthly plan for access via the Web and a phone app, a $20 plan for the Web and the iPad app, and $35 for an all-access option. Subscribers to the print edition -- which costs about $63 a month (after an initial 50 percent-off deal), at least here in the Bay Area -- will get everything for no extra charge.

(Canadians are subject to the new plan immediately -- they're serving as beta testers for us Yanks. Thanks, Canadians!)

Other than the fact that the Times is attaching a price to its online content, the most important fact about its strategy is that this paywall only goes into effect for fairly voracious readers. You can read 20 articles a month at no charge. [b]People who come to the site via Google will be able to read five stories a day for free; visitors from Facebook and Twitter won't have to pay. Clearly, the goal is to extract some money out of people who treat the digital incarnations of the Times pretty much like a newspaper, without killing traffic from more casual types who come only occasionally or are directed to specific stories by their friends.

Looking around the Web, I can't find anyone giving the Times' new strategy a thumbs up. I do find plenty of people saying they won't pay and criticizing the permeable paywall for being too complicated and predicting it will fail. I'm willing to give it a chance, at least -- unlike failed paywalls of the past, it's designed to be transparent to everybody but serious Times readers.

So will I pay up? Well...maybe. Probably. Especially since it's a deductible business expense, and especially since I cheerfully admit to having a bias in favor of the idea of people being willing to pay for high-quality content.

I don't understand, however, why the all-access plan costs as much as the Web/phone and Web/iPad plans put together. Doesn't that mean that all-access subscribers are paying for the Web twice? (Sounds to me it's like a restaurant that charges $15 for a burger and Coke, $20 for a burger and fries, or $35 for a burger, a Coke, and fries.)

Of course, whether any one person (especially any one person who happens to be in the media himself) is willing to pay up is immaterial. The opinions that matter are those of the millions of people who aren't used to paying for news on the Web.

youbetcha

You can read articles on the NY Times for free if you follow @freeNYTimes on twitter

youbetcha

You can read articles on the NY Times for free if you follow @freeNYTimes on twitter