TimesSelect: Deselected

On September 19, the New York Times finally announced the end of its subscription-based web component, Times Select, which had formerly charged readers for access to its opinion articles and much of its archives. As a Times marketing site proclaims, “Now everyone is entitled to our opinions.”

This decision, though seemingly sudden, doesn’t seem so out of place when considering the rapid pace of transformation which journalism has been undergoing during this era of dramatic technological innovation. The last fifteen years especially, with the advent of the internet, have been witness to radical changes in the way we think about time (which has become immediate) and space (which has collapsed). The internet, whether or not newspapers would like to admit it, has become an influential—if not dominant—way of disseminating news. As the world goes virtual, the average reader in New York can read about things that happened across the world within hours, if not minutes.

The New York Times, in business as a daily newspaper since 1851, realized this fact early, and launched their online edition in 1996, a year before it even published its first color photograph. And their site is phenomenal—the search engines make looking up articles by author, title, or subject much easier than most of the other online editions of major American newspapers. As noted in a Times article published the day before the annulment of Times Select, “The Times’ site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site.”

However, this facility of access has its downsides too: with fast connection to the internet growing more and more common, the format of paper news is fitting less and less into the eco-friendly, tech-savvy generation that is becoming our own. While the reader benefits from instantaneous news found online, the publishers of these news sources have struggled as subscription rates go down and the physical “paper copy” becomes almost irrelevant. The days of tycoons like William Randolph Hearst earning millions from the newspaper industry are gone. Less people buy papers, and companies are less willing to pay enormous sums for advertisements. In the last five years alone, the stock price of the New York Times Company has decreased by more than half.

In an effort to recuperate costs lost to the slew of online readers, they began to require a monthly or yearly sum ($7.95 or 49.95, respectively) in order to have web access to their celebrity writers’ columns, their extensive online archives, and much of the Sunday magazine content. The Times, it must be noted, was not alone—among those who have dabbled (or are still dabbling) in partial or full subscription-based online formats are many other media moguls, like the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and Time Magazine.

But something changed their minds this September. Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Times, Vivian Schiller, justified the decision to end this paid subscription in the following way: “We believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism.”

This statement is tempting to believe. Ideals of “unfettered” freedom and “vitality of journalism” fit easily into our schema of a journalism informally understood as a “fourth branch of government,” or the “watchdog of democracy.” But the Times Select component of the company was bringing them in over $10 million a year, and so deserves a more complex analysis to the question of why they would give this up.

Perhaps the decision was made from a purely idealistic perspective, as a statement on a natural-born right to freedom of information. The columnists themselves had, after all, been fighting for an end to the exclusive Times Select, claiming that it limited their readership. In the spirit of Luther, perhaps, the Times decided to return to the reader direct access to the Word, as it was revealed and transcribed by prophets of likes of Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, and Nicolas Kristoff. It is possible that they wanted to allow the internet surfer, once again, entry to “all the news that’s fit to print” (and not just some of it).

More likely, however, the move was monetary. Just as the number of copies sold has always affected the income of a newspaper, so now what is important is the number of unique visitors to the website. The problem in this new era is attracting a maximum of viewers, making advertising on the site more valuable. An October article by the Associate Press cited that “luring new readers means connecting with them on the Internet through blogs, live online chats and interactive databases.”

While we generally hold journalism to a higher moral and even professional standard than most other industries, it is important to remember that the New York Times is in fact run by the New York Times Company. Change, therefore, is fueled more often by economic carrots than ethical sticks. Their move from paper-only to the addition of online in 1996 was the first response to competition in our technological generation. The transition this year out of the 2005 partially subscription-based online version was their second. In the spirit of the “invisible hand,” the capitalistic economy is once again following the Smithian road in providing the best for the consumer: free, “unfettered” access to one of the best news sources in the country.