With the summer slow-season at an end, we are seeing some bigger-than-incremental steps that suggest the big players are starting to place their bets on one or another route for developing their business. The most striking -- and strikingly different -- approaches are from the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Some months ago, the NYT gave advance warning of its big upcoming change -- placing more premium content behind an online subscription wall and adding some services (mainly archives access) to the subscription package. Courtesy The Agonist, here's the most recent promo from the NYT:
On Monday, Sept. 19, NYTimes.com will launch a new subscription service, TimesSelect, an important step in the development of The New York Times.
Subscribers to TimesSelect will have exclusive online access to many of our most influential columnists in Op-Ed, Business, New York/Region and Sports. In addition to reading the columns, TimesSelect subscribers can also engage with our columnists through video interviews and Web-only postings.
All of our news, features, editorials and analysis will remain free to readers of NYTimes.com, as will our interactive graphics, multimedia and popular video minutes.
As part of TimesSelect, The Times is also opening up its vast archive of articles reaching back 25 years and eventually back to the paper's founding in 1851. TimesSelect subscribers can read up to 100 articles from the archive a month. For many years our readers have asked for seamless access to The Times's historical archive, and we are now making this available as part of TimesSelect....
TimesSelect will cost $49.95 a year and will be free for home delivery subscribers to the newspaper. This week, you can sign up early to get uninterrupted access to the columns when TimesSelect launches Sept. 19.
The move to put the NYT's famous op-ed pages behind a subscription wall has generated a great deal of, mostly humorous, blogospheric comment over the months since the move was announced. Some bloggers regularly count the days until their least-favorite pundit disappears behind the wall so they "don't have to read him/her anymore." But in practical terms, the great question is usually framed not as "will I subscribe?" but rather "will I still link?" The impression from remarks by most political bloggers who have to pay subscriptions out of their personal piggybanks is a "wait and see" attitude. As John Aravosis of Americablog explained to Editor & Publisher -- most will figure that any op-ed or column that's a real "must read" is going to be passed around by email or available somewhere on the web by hook or by crook. The "will I link" has always been a protocol challenge for bloggers who want to link to news items that are subscription only -- such as the WSJ or even the NYT where, without a link generator, the original url of an article disappears into the black hole of a paid archives in relatively short order.
Yet the "to link or not to link" issue doesn't seem to have been a prime consideration of the NYT's management. Perhaps that's due to their overwhelming current margin of links over all other competitors. As reported by Technorati's State of the Blogosphere August 2005, the NYT clocks in at 50,000 links, with the Post the closest behind at 30,000. With that web presence as a base, the thinking at the NYT appears to be two-fold. How to use the technology of the web to differentiate content distribution for different segments of the paying public. And especially important in a world of declining print circulation and resulting threats to traditional advertising revenues, how to make the paper's online offerings reinforce rather than cannibalize its print audience.
Although the NYT's parent company, The New York Times Company, produced a flurry of excitement and speculation about their internet strategy when they acquired about.com last February, the NYT seems to have decided to be on the web, not of it. Jay Rosen applied that distinction initially to the Guardian, which under Simon Waldman, clearly has decided to strive to be of the web. Now it looks like the Washington Post has made the same decision the Guardian took awhile back.
The Post's new directions are being introduced with little fanfare by comparison with the NYT's big change. But over the past several months it seems as if every week brings innovations to the Post. The most visible immediate change is the revamped home page -- not terribly exciting visually, but tailored geographically for the user, which is great if, like I am, you're a resident of the Washington metro area. It's convenient for out-of-towners as well, since they don't have to wade through DC/VA/MD politics, the latest in traffic nightmares, and the town's Redskins obsession which us locals can't live without. Advertisers, whether local or national, will undoubtedly enjoy better targeting. Yes, I know, it takes an extra step at registration, but set your cookies and you're ready to roll. It's not as if the Post is one of those rarely-used sites that makes registration such an aggravation -- a small price to pay for great free content, and a mini-extra-step that enhances user experience.
The visual and navigation overhaul of the Post's Opinion section is even more recent and, given how poorly most online newspaper Opinion pages are organized, highly welcome. But the real innovation is arriving via weekly introductions of more and more reporter-produced content in a variety of shapes, sizes and publishing rhythms. The "live online discussions" seem in recent months to have attracted more enthusiastic attention both from Post writers and from the online audience, perhaps because the discussions appear to be more relevant to other content on the site as navigation continues to improve. Blogs for different purposes are popping up everywhere. Some reporters' blogs are now actual Typepad blogs with comments and trackbacks. RSS has become ubiquitous, no longer limited to a handful of pre-defined categories. And all of this content -- both traditional "for publication" stories and the more informal reporter journals -- is increasingly integrated with a whole range of internal and external content. Not only are The Washington Post Company's other properties on the web (Slate and Newsweek) highlighted, but now the entire blogosphere as captured by Technorati shows up for each piece of content.
Just take this week's special live-blogging of the Roberts hearings as an example. A nice little Typepad blog, with comments, trackbacks and RSS syndication. A regular stream throughout the day of summaries of each segment of the proceedings, interspersed with links to the video of the relevant portion of the hearings and with helpful links to case law under discussion. And further links to relevant sections, news stories, analyses, online discussions, video, transcripts, etc., both on and off site. Sweet.
The overall impression from these changes is that content is growing more dynamic -- no longer simply the electronic publication of a series of static stories, or photos or graphics. Each Post page becomes the center of, or portal to, a constantly changing network of relevant linky goodness.
The changes are also increasingly reflected in the approach reporters are taking to their respective "beats." Certainly, the "stories for publication" remain fixed by the size, form and flow that are dictated by the conventions of newsprint distribution. In that domain, the Post competes with other news outlets in its attempts to tell news stories better and, in its particular government-related specialties, with greater coverage. But the news stories are being enriched with complementary content by those same reporters, who are bringing more than simply extra information.
The more conversational format discourages the "neutral observer" voice, the practice of passing along press releases as news, and the "he said/she said" scripts. Along with the practice of linking to other sources comes the reporter's commentary on what each link means in the overall picture. A more candid perspective from the reporter emerges from this conversational voice. The most striking example has been the daily White House "briefing" now written by Dan Froomkin. As his daily column has become more bloggy in format, it's also become far more informative. Well before Katrina, which seemed in Froomkin's words to bring the political press to an "emperor has no clothes" moment, Froomkin had broken out of the normal constraints of the White House press corp -- which seems doomed to play either stenographer for press secretaries or Presidential psychoanalyst. It's as if the more liberal form of expression has been equally liberating for the content being expressed.
If the printed news story is history's first draft, a permanent record however partial of "what happened," the new types of complementary content implicitly acknowledge the limits of that permanent printed record. The stories are shown to have added layers. The complementary content also celebrates the fact that the stories are constantly evolving -- evolving not simply in the sense that tomorrow's events will overtake today's or that we will have more information about those events in the future, but that their context and meaning are always in the process of morphing as they become part of broader conversations.
Those broader conversations are being showcased by the Post's new features. Whereas the NYT appears indifferent to the potential loss of links to their stable of famous columnists, the Post is promoting on its own site every link from every blogger, no matter how obscure, to each of its articles or blogs. Whereas the NYT is creating an incentive for its home delivery subscribers to keep paying subscription fees and maintain current circulation levels for advertisers, the Post is creating an incentive for every blogger or website to see the Post the preferred place to get and link to the news.
Now why might links matter in the great grand scheme of things? Here are some thoughts on that very point by Eric Nelson, a Senior Editor at John Wiley and Sons, specializing in current affairs and history, who explained in a post on Jay Rosen's PressThink "why you don't do a book deal with the big name columnist to whom no one links."
[T]here are some major newspaper and magazine columnists, whom I won’t name, but I never see them linked to, ever. These people are all “famous,” but to me, if absolutely no one is blogging your stuff, no one’s reading it in the paper either.
[...]
In real estate, it’s location, location, location. In publishing, it’s insight, insight, insight. When a reader picks up a book, they don’t just want to know about a subject, they want to understand it. Even those hot new biographies you see advertised promising new information from uncovered archives or letters, only sell because of what that new information means. No one would want a whole book about Nixon’s newly uncovered dental records, unless they revealed something important about him. (Like he had microphones in his teeth.)
The book that sells the best on a hot new topic, like terrorism, is usually the one with the clearest insights. And now, the article or blog post with the clearest insights is often the most widely read one as well.
One idea I’m always pitching to Jay, and anyone else who will listen, is that we’ve moved from the “Information Age” to the “Age of Insight.” When Bush announced his budget, for instance, you could get that information from any one of thousands of sources. But a handful of people presented the best explanations (left and right) of what his budget really means. Because of blogs, it’s easy to figure out who those people are, and sometimes they’re even bloggers.
Not only are the economic cost/benefit analyses for the NYT and the Post remarkably different. I expect the difference in the two approaches will in the long run have an impact on the content of the two newspapers and ultimately their philosophy of what it means to be a news organization. The NYT proposes to continue to "deliver" its "product." The Post, by contrast, is becoming a portal to a dynamic network of content, only a portion of which is home-grown. But by placing its own content at the heart of the portal and letting its home-grown content interact both with other Post-produced content and with content produced by others, the Post is pursuing a far different model than a classic portal, which aggregates content produced by others. In the process of distributing that home-grown content via the portal, the Post's own way of producing content, and the content itself, will continually be changed or enriched by the interaction with other content and content producers. Maybe, if Eric Nelson is right, the process may even produce added insight from Post reporters on their blogs, or from the commenters or trackbackers or Technorati-linkers, even if they're not named Friedman, Dowd, Brooks, Tierney, Kristoff or Krugman.
Very, very different bets. The NYT's business model is easier to discern than the Post Company's business model -- which clearly incorporates not just the Post but its other media properties. But then again, the NYT's model is easier to understand because it's basically defensive -- do better, whether in terms of quality vis a vis competitors, advertising revenues or satisfying their existing customer base, with their current newspaper business. The Post is, bit by bit, devising a new type of multi-media news business.
I'm enjoying watching this new creature emerge as the Post writers and managers learn from their growing laboratory of experiments. Now if they'd just trash the old Newsweek site, with the clunky MSNBC frame, and build a totally new clean one from scratch!
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