http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2015/12/14/payment-per-article-coming-to-u-s-.html
Ugh.
Already here for many academic-type journals and their articles.
What a lousy article about it from the Times–it doesn’t answer the most basic question, which is, “how much are these micropayments going to be?”
This already exists in some print/digital media. Or some articles are free, others have a paywall. Or portions of an article (abbreviated forms) are available for free, full content at a fee. You can generally get digital subscriptions for quite inexpensive to keep up with your favorites.
How do you expect print journalism to pay their staff, production, etc. if so many readers choose do not buy hard copy and just want to read online???
I’ve been paying for the NYT on line for several years now. It’s $9. 99/month but worth it for me as I read it every day.
There are ways to read it for free but it’s a PITA IMO.
If you want me to pay for something online, it should have some compelling/unique content. I pay a fee for a couple very focused websites for hobbies of mine, and don’t mind at all because the content is simply not available anywhere else. My local newspaper put up a paywall few years ago, and I avoid it altogether because there is no unique content.
Do you pay for any magazine subscriptions to your home? Professional journals hard copy or online?
What does get annoying is when a print source posts a link on Twitter or elsewhere to an article - so you assume it’s free - but there is actually a paywall.
It may force you to choose favorites - those worth paying a bit for.
Check and see if your favorite columnists have blogs - sometimes they will summarize or discuss an online article there and you can read those for free - sometimes!
Already here for many academic-type journals and their articles.>>>>>>>
Yes, that’s true. We would have to get the medical librarian to get some articles for us sometimes. It will be difficult to share articles to discuss online. That said, it would be nice to be able to read one article without having to buy the whole subscription. I wish how much per article had been mentioned.
I suspect the per article charge will not be all that small, if for anything they probably would prefer people get a digital subscription and have regular revenue, making money on a per article basis would be all over the place. I know that currently, if someone comes to a pay site directly (like from facebook), they can read the article for free, but if you went to the main website and looked for it, you would need to pay for it.
I have a Times digital subscription, and it is worth it, I tend to read a lot on there. For other sites, I may be okay with a pay per read kind of thing, or will look to other sources.
One of the downsides of the Net is that people may tend to read the free sites and many of those are not news sites, they are really blog sites or basically repeat what they have read on twitter and social media as ‘fact’. Professional sites have staff who actually do fact checking (I hope), and it costs to produce it. While the sites have ad revenue, it doesn’t cover the full cost of operating plus a profit margin, so charging is a way to be able to operate.
I have a NYTimes and a WSJ digital subscription. To me they are worth every penny.
We pay for the weekend editions of the Times in paper (Fri/Sat/Sun) which gives us the rest of the paper on line. Except for the crossword puzzle which we have to pay extra for. That crabs me a bit, since we only need it for Thursday, which for us is a nice mixture of fun themes and not too easy like Mon-Wed usually are.
A nickel or a dime – happy to pay, as long as they make it easy. A buck? Nope.
I pay for a NYT on-line subscription, and that is completely worth it. Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal. Nope.
What irritates me about the Chicago Tribune (well, one of many things; we just cancelled our 20+ year subscription after horrible, horrible customer service) is that we paid for the hard copy, which H likes to read, but the online edition makes it such that some articles can only be accessed via the digital subscription - so they want us to have two subscriptions. No way - their delivery is abysmal - so many mistakes it would take me all night to write about them.
What I’ve learned I can do for now (I’m sure they’ll find a way to work around this) is, I go online to their website, and if I see a headline of a story I’d like to read, I google search the headline exactly as it appears, and a link with the entire article will come up for me.
They lost me when, about a year ago, they decided that vacation holds do not earn you a credit anymore. So if we’re gone two weekends (and a full week in between), they won’t credit our account for the newspapers they don’t deliver… which hardly matters anyway because most of the time they do end up delivering them even though I put a vacation hold on. And when I get back I hear from neighbors how our newspapers piled up in the driveway. Yet I am able to provide proof via email confirmation that I did, indeed, put a vacation hold on. The last two weekends that our subscription was active, they failed completely to deliver Saturday’s newspapers. So, no, I don’t feel bad for ‘cheating’ them out of their articles by doing a google search and accessing the digital articles anyway without a subscription.
And believe me, I’ve tried ‘escalating’ the issue MANY times when I’ve called in to complain.
Teri, we just did the same with the Seattle Times… The happy memories of Sunday mornings divvying up the paper… Dad gets the business section… Kiddos get the funnies… I get the local news and the HS/collegiate sports. Did they have to ruin this with their nasty, pushy customer service?!
Teri, the Washington Post also ended the credits for vacation stops. We cancelled our dead tree subscription as a result. I really miss it. Now we just get Sundays, though it seems if there are big advertising inserts, they give us Thursday. Sometimes they deliver Saturday, and even though we put a stop on Sunday if we are out of town, it inevitably shows up in our driveway.
My kids grew up devouring newspapers. I was so pleased. The newspapers are pushing online so hard now, though, that print is more trouble than it’s worth. A real shame, IMHO.
Like several others I have a digital subscription to the NYT. I also get their Sunday paper in print but plan to end that. I already have a paper subscription to WaPo and that’s enough Sunday paper as I want to spend time with.
I can read the NYT and the Wall Street Journal free online using my public library account.
If I pay, there better not be any ads.
When we go on vacation, our neighbor puts a vacation hold on their paper and they read ours. It’s our idea as we don’t really want more people than necessary to know we’re out of town and they never leave town. They’re happy, as our trips tend to leave them with a bonus month or two of extra time on their subscription every year. We feel it’s a great way to thank the neighbors for keeping an eye on our place, moving the trash cans, and watering sometimes.
I get two newspapers delivered every day, the NYT and the local city newspaper. I read them both and I guess I’ll probably be the last subscriber to actual paper newspapers. I hate to see that era end. Reading online will never be as satisfying to me.