Pay to Play

With the New York Times announcing that it will start charging for its website, an examination of why scientific and journalistic publishing seem to be headed in opposite directions.

The New York Times dropped a bombshell this week: Beginning in 2011, the Gray Lady will begin charging non-subscribers for access to articles on its website.

That the world’s most famous newspaper would try to monetize its website (again) wasn’t a total shock, and the question of paywall efficacy has been recently hashed out over at the Time’s competitor, The Wall Street Journal. Still, it was a wake-up call to the blogosphere: Sometime in the near future, an important organism in the online informational ecosystem will radically change its behavior. Readers relying on it for intellectual sustenance will have to expend more resources hunting it down, or look elsewhere.

The skeptics were the first into the fray. Slate’s Jack Shafer was quick to point out the many ways the Times’ paywall could fail, mostly through the machinations of the technologically inclined. And Felix Salmon felt that his own Reuters would stand to reap the benefit of the Times’ blunder, as online writers would rather link to the former rather than risk running readers into a wall with the latter. As he says,  “Needless to say, it’s almost impossible to build ‘active communities’ behind a paywall.”

Questions about how the paywall would actually affect the link economy aside, this statement must be missing a word or hiding a whole lot behind that “almost,” as pretty much every communal activity requires a buy-in of some sort. Whether you’re paying dues to a bowling league or a church, shelling out cash for a World of Warcraft membership or a box set of The Wire so you can talk about it with your coworkers, the content has a price tag attached. We all pay to play at one point or another.

And sometimes we pay to work. Scientific publishing certainly operates this way. There are test cases for the journalistic world —The New Scientist has recently erected a prototype of how the New York Times’ paywall might operate—but the real model is in academia, where paying thousands upon thousands of dollars for journal subscriptions is just the price of doing business.

Read more . . .

Related articles by Zemanta

• New York Times Website May Charge: Will You Pay? [POLL] (mashable.com)
• The Value Of The Link vs. The Value Of The Content (techdirt.com)
• Why the NYT’s Paywall Could Succeed (markevanstech.com)
• New York Times Launching a Metered Pay Model – A Look at the Opportunity/Numbers (newscred.com)
• NYT Online Going Pay-Per-View (outsidethebeltway.com)

Random Posts:

• Mom-and-Pop Operators Turn to Social Media
• An Online Scheduling System for Appointments that Everyone Can Use
• Nanotechnology And Synthetic Biology: Americans Don’t Know What’s Coming
• SW2 & More Update
• Decentralisation

Related posts:

1. Publisher Lays Out Plan to Save Newspapers
2. Google Unveils News-by-Topic Service
3. All the news that’s free to print
4. Adding Fees and Fences on Media Sites
5. NPR Recognizes It Makes Business Sense To Give Up Content Cash Cow And Go Free

Tags: blogosphere, blunder, gray lady, new york times, pay to play, pay to read, paying dues, skeptics, wall street journal

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Communications, Consider This, Innovation Needed, NY Times, Shape of Things to Come?, disruptive innovation. 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.