Quake
July 9th, 2009
Greg Bensinger: “New York Times Co. said in a survey of print subscribers that it’s considering a $5 monthly fee for access to its namesake newspaper’s Web site.”
Back in ye olde 2008, I wrote about record companies expecting the same revenues from digital distribution that they got for actually doing something.
I was a paper boy when I was a kid. An unreliable one. You might have found your paper wet in a shrub, but I might also have forgotten to charge you. One morning, I fell off my bike, and skinned my knee. Since it was 5 in the morning, I figured I screwed up, and kept going. Remember that making a teenager wake up at 5 is like asking an adult to wake up at 3. The natural wake up time is earlier for older people–school is optimized for teachers.
Anyway, I got back home with my skinned knee, and my mother had been wondering whether I was ok… because there had been an earthquake while I was out on my paper route.
That doesn’t happen when you look at the New York Times on the Internet. What are you paying for?
update: I’ll answer the obvious question: What about that brilliant reporting?
Or maybe I’ll just let it hang.