A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE
A few posts ago I explained my difficulties and disagreement with the New York Times putting their columnists behind a subscription wall online and packaging it as a new "product" called TimesSelect. I described how despite being a subscriber to the paper for over two decades, and entitled to receive the new service online as part of the package, I've had no success activating the service through the "customer support" of the paper both via their web site and their toll-free telephone lines.
Since then, I've found anecdotally that I do not seek out the columnist I like the most, Thomas Friedman, in the physical paper. In fact, I realized that the physical paper piles up unopened on most days, because for the most part I've already read the things I want online in the pre-dawn hours before the paper is even delivered. I'm simply making do without his content.
The extra effort to seek out the columnist I'd like to read in the paper paper generally does not seem to be worth the effort in a day increasingly filled with growing digital demands in the day.
Mind you, this is not simple laziness...it's just that with exploding email, blogs, IMs, etc., there's only a finite amount of time that can be allocated to media in a day. The twenty minutes that one used to scan the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times in the morning are increasingly being spread out over a dozen newspaper sites online through an RSS reader through My Yahoo! or Bloglines.
Maybe I just wasn't as addicted to their select content as I might have thought.
This doesn't seem to be the case for a lot of other people.
Joe Achenbach, columnist at the Washington Times has a hilarious post on his blog (a must-read/subscribe) on how there are now anecdotal sightings of "underground" parties where folks get together to read and share their favorite NY Times columnists, with a particular focus on Maureen Dowd. He explains:
"Last night a friend handed over two pieces of paper containing words that I quickly recognized to be one of the most precious commodities in the current information marketplace: The Maureen Dowd column. A black market printout. This was like the samizdat of the Soviet dissidents. My hands trembled, and as I rapidly scanned the column I kept telling myself, "Slow down, slow down." Instinct makes you want to rush through the thing before someone takes it away."
He adds:
"...most of my acquaintances simply throw Dowd parties. An email goes out: "Dowdfest at MacArthur Blvd. Starbucks!" And then everyone converges. Someone always has a photocopy of Mo's latest savage tweaking of the Bush dynasty.
It's never clear where the samizdat originates -- I assume some computer whiz has hacked into the Times Select wallgarden. Although I haven't done a full survey, I believe the Frank Rich crowd gets together at Java House, the Paul Krugman fans gather at Busboys & Poets, and the David Brooksians can be found at the Metropolitan Club.
The key thing is, Times Select is bringing people together in new mini-communities that are dedicated not only to their favorite Times columnist but also to the principle that no one should be forced to pay for opinion columns. It feels revolutionary. It feels like the Prague Spring."
The whole piece is a must-read, along with the 280 plus comments (Joe's blog generally has the most comment discussions around...his blog has become a veritable, virtual water cooler for hundreds of people everyday).
What struck me the most though was how he described the increasing pressures on the select columnists to produce and do more, something I'd touched on in my post as well.
He says:
"Another huge drawback to Times Select is that the columnists are under extreme pressure to produce writing that can justify a surcharge. You can sense they're straining. No doubt they will pound out a perfectly fine column and then think: Is it good enough for Times Select? And then they'll go back into it and insert allegedly more valuable insights and jokes and observations, not realizing that they're destroying the natural warp and woof of the column. Especially the woof.
Times Select demands that columnists produce not just the usual written material, but all kinds of "extras," like their favorite cookie recipe, their private list of Top Ten Beatles Songs, and their secret feelings about major public figures that they could never normally publish due to libel concerns."
This highlights a general problem that all traditional print publication increasingly face. The commonality of interests between a journalist/reporter/columnist with his/her employer is increasingly being misaligned.
One could argue that besides a paycheck, the prime draw of any premier newspaper is the platform it provides the journalist/columnist in terms of the prestige and circulation. Increasingly, the interests of these folks are more aligned with their work being available online, indexed constantly by the search engines, and being accessible forever, archives and all.
This of course is not in the interests of the paper paper, and thus the disconnect.
Not to mention the increasing number of regular readers of the paper, who are having to fit in online media consumption into the time they'd allocated for just print and maybe a little TV consumption in a busy day. A study sponsored by Yahoo! released yesterday indicated that over 50% of RSS feeds being read by consumers online were in the general news category (you can download a PDF version here). Although RSS feeds are NOT mainstream yet as the study indicates, they likely will be in a couple of years, as the technologies to read them gets more available and simplified.
The time is fast approaching when the best of the best columnists and journalists will increasingly look for more flexibility, via their own branded blogs and related business models. We will also likely see some of them move to entirely web-based media companies like Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and others.
I know we saw some of this in Web 1.0 in the nineties (Michael Kingsley leaving print/broadcast platforms for Microsoft's Slate web site), but it was a bit early back then in a narrowband Internet. We're now in a Web 2.0 world, you understand.
This trend will accelerate especially with the advent of more robust broadband wireless networks and devices that will add a whole additional layer of potential readers in the tens of millions.
This is not to say that the New York Times won't be able to also take advantage of these technologies and platforms, but the business model conflict between the old and the new will continue to be a major impediment.
The Times, they are indeed changing...
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