Month: March 2011

A reader writes:

I happen to be in Canada at the moment, where the New York Times has already erected its paywall as a test-run prior to full roll-out.  As an avid reader of the Times, I have absolutely no problem with paying for access, so when I got a friendly pop-up saying I had read my 20 free articles for the month, I clicked on the button to subscribe.  That’s when the amateur hour began. 

As an already registered user, I was prompted to enter my password, did so, and immediately was stuck in an unbreakable loop of repeated password requests.  Giving up with the online subscription, I called their 800 number and was put on hold with a message that wait times were 2-4 minutes.  Eleven minutes later my call was finally picked-up by a call center worker who only knew how to set up an online subscription for people with print subscriptions.  After having her put me on hold twice, I finally gave up and disconnected, still without access to the Times and after about 18 minutes on an international call.  This is absolutely ridiculous, and not how they should be treating customers who are happy to subscribe. 

Will I eventually subscribe?  Of course.  But for the next few weeks I suspect I will be getting my news from the BBC, the Dish, etc.

Another writes:

I've been thinking long and hard about the NY Times paywall. I'm in my twenties and on Twitter, so I know how to get around the paywall, but ultimately do I want to? I read a lot of great blogs that keep me overly connected during the day, but the Times gives me something beyond yesterday's news: it essentially aggregates lots of stories and trends for me while guaranteeing a certain level of writing and incision. I know that that's kind of a reverse technological way of thinking of a newspaper, but it's true enough. I wouldn't read about classical music, or follow all the latest real estate news, or know as much about the Knicks if I didn't read the Times (I live in the people's republic of Cambridge!), and for me that's worth paying for. Yes, I could follow all of these things independently, learning the ins-and-outs of about 20 different blogospheres, but subscribing to the Times website is much easier.

Sure I'd prefer that the subscription were cheaper – how about a $10/month website only option? – but I think it's better for society if we start paying for the on-line content we value. I'd like to see writers paid living wages for their work and to see the number of media jobs expand over the next few years. Truthfully, I also like the feeling that I'm supporting an institution whose work I enjoy; it's why I'm a print subscriber to The Atlantic, and why I donated money to This American Life.

Do I need the paper NY Times? No. But I do support the newsgathering organization, and I'll pay for it.

Another:

Why don't newspapers actively court donations?  I'd be happy to spend a non-trivial amount of money of my choosing in the hope of keeping the Guardian what it is.  Maybe £50-£100 every year or so?  Less than a subscription, freer than a paywall, more lucrative than ad-supported.

Another:

I think what a lot of people are missing in the NY Times paywall is that it should drive print subscriptions.  The weekend delivery subscription is $3.80 per week, while the weekly digital subscription is $3.75 a week.  Since the weekend subscription comes with seven-day-a-week digital access, you essentially get the Friday, Saturday and Sunday issues for a nickel.  It's a no-brainer for anyone who wants to read the NY Times every day.

But the company gets far more than that from people like me.  I only read the paper online, and haven't had a print subscription to the paper since 1995 or so.  That means their only revenue from me was from online ads.  But now they get the online ad revenue, a nickel extra from me every week, another subscriber to add to the print ad rates and the online fee. 

I am simply assuming that the NY Times is relying on people like me being self interested enough to get a print subscription, and for those who don't want it they're leaving in workarounds like RSS feeds and blog links. I can't see how they lose.

Another:

Felix Salmon is right: "once you become habituated to avoiding the NYT, and learn to get your news elsewhere, you'll continue to do that no matter where the meter is set." The same $195 per year that the NY Times wants to charge for full access, from both my laptop and cell phone, buys me full access for a year to all of the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker, which is why I subscribe to the digital editions of both.

I once read the Times every day. Over the past two years, that Journal-New Yorker combination is probably the main reason why I practically stopped reading it at all, while it was available for free. There was more than enough breadth and depth in the alternatives to make them worth the price. That, plus all the free reading available elsewhere on the web, made the Times redundant. The only time I read it now is when someone like you links me there, and even when they start charging readers I can still catch up on Douhat without incurring a toll.

Another:

This post is embarrassing for the Columbia School of Journalism: its dean Bill Grueskin makes the bizarre claim that it is inappropriate to criticize the NYT at a time when its journalists are putting their lives at risk. He also mocks the résumé of writer Cory Doctorow, whose views he disagrees with.

This silliness obscures an insightful observation that he makes about the new NY Times paywall: that its value to the paper might be more in shoring up the base of print subscribers (3/4 of ad revenue) by providing them with a new benefit, free online access, than in extracting payments from online-only readers.

More Dish discussion here, here, here and here.

Katie Roiphe's child is applying to pre-school:

My 18-month-old recently had his first school interview. Apparently he sailed through it, though how is somewhat mysterious to me. Especially since he calls all fruits "apples" and sentences such as "Mommy. Moon. Get it" are not necessarily indicative of a huge understanding of the workings of the universe. However, no one is too young for the system, and a small obstacle like language cannot be permitted to get in the way of the judging and selecting and general Darwinian sorting to which it is never too soon to accustom yourself in this city. I have been asked to write recommendations for other one-and-a-half-year-olds for this same lovely school, and have thought of, but did not actually write, "He knows a lot about trucks."

Jonah Lehrer gets to the moral of one of his favorite recent papers, “Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee":

It doesn’t matter if one is looking at retention rates at West Point or teacher performance within Teach for America or success in the spelling bee: Factors like grit are often the most predictive variables of real world performance. Thomas Edison was right: even genius is mostly just perspiration.

Robert Krulwich recounts some creepy cases from Argentina:

During the mid 1970s the Argentine military set up a baby-redistribution network, headquartered at the Campo de Mayo Hospital and the Escuela Mecanica de la Armada in Argentina. Fact-finding commissions have established that the regime systematically kidnapped young parents who expressed left-wing sympathies, then killed those parents, dropping many of them alive from airplanes into the ocean. If the women were pregnant, the regime created maternity wards where mothers were drugged or forced (their hands and feet tied to the beds) to have cesarean sections to accelerate birth. If they survived childbirth, they were murdered. …

That way, the junta would not only eliminate its political opponents; it would steal their children. Kids who might have grown up thinking like their parents would now grow up thinking like their parents' enemies. This was a double erasure.

A reader writes:

My cousin is a life-flight nurse, and previously was an EMT and paramedic. My wife is a hospice social worker. Both therefore deal with life-and death-issues every day. The humor in these professions is very dark and often tasteless. My cousin says that not only do EMTs and paramedics joke, so do emergency room nurses and doctors. My wife regularly says that people would be horrified if they heard about how nurses and social workers joke about their clients.

But they all acknowledge that it's so hard to deal with these issues that they need some sort of humor to handle it and thus joke about what makes them most uncomfortable.

So to the reader whose family joked while losing his sister wondered, "I don't know if this is how it normally goes," from what I've heard it's pretty normal among people in professions who must regularly handle such loss. That his family responded this way makes perfect sense.

Another writes:

I spent many years working evenings and nights as an X-Ray Tech. When there was a code in the ER, I would go there to be there if I was needed. I used to judge the chances of the patients survival by the amount of laughter in the cardiac room. The more laughter, the less likely the patient would survive.

My theory is that the staff was defending themselves from facing their own mortality. The more hopeless the case, the more aware they became of their own end. The person whose family joked at the sister's death bed were just doing what we humans do when facing the awareness of our own inevitable demise.

Larison worries:

The intervention creates an incentive for provoking governments to commit large-scale atrocities by launching armed rebellions against them. This isn’t going to guarantee future interventions, but it may help create the conditions for future massacres. For many reasons, Western powers are not always going to be so quick to intervene, but the Libyan intervention creates the expectation that other governments will feel compelled to step in if the rebels’ situation is dire enough.

That is likely to encourage rebel movements that are militarily and politically weak and have little chance of succeeding on their own, but which are just strong enough to create a crisis that will lead to calls for another intervention. We can’t know how much political instability and violence the implied promise of future interventions may cause, but it is a horrible precedent to set.

A reader writes:

@freenyt! I love it.

Remember, the WSJ has a paywall. But in order for its stories to show up in Google News, there is a free version of each posted with a long URL. All you have to do is to copy the first sentence of the article and paste it in to Google, run a news search, and, voila, your article appears. (I'll always remember this because it's how Jim Newell got his Peggy Noonan fix when she was paywalled.)

I wonder how the Times will get around this one, too. Or the fact that my parents get the Fri-Sat-Sun times subscription and I can use my dad's login. Somehow I don't see this wall being particularly solid.

Today on the Dish, Andrew considered this war's effect on Jihadism, and historic predecessors like British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston who exercised restraint in aiding others' democratic movements. Chait, Klein and Andrew asked why intervene this time, Goldblog's jaw remained dropped, and the right sniffed Obama's blood in the water. Andrew couldn't get behind Marc Lynch's argument that Libya determines how other dicatators act in the Middle East, PM Carpenter believed in Obama's character, and Ambinder parsed Clinton's developing doctrine. John Lee Anderson interviewed one of Qaddafi's fighters and shook hands with the rebels, Issandr El Amrani questioned the non-violent intentions of Libyan rebels, and Megan Scully and Exum calculated the cost of this war. Andrew meditated  on the tao of Derb, Peter Beinart reminded us we can't control the rebels, Manzi warned of an international arms race, and insurgencies started. The African Union and Putin echoed the Arab League, the UAE balked, and the British split, confused over Resolution 1973. Weigel didn't foresee a congressional vote, Yglesias demeaned the "better than Iraq" yardstick, and David Boaz missed the anti-war movement in lieu of an anti-war president. Public support dwindled, Tripoli quieted down, and Alan Taylor viewed the war through the photographer's lens. Yemen's regime may be approaching an end, and Steven L. Taylor saw Libya as an incentive for dictators to go nuclear. Frank Gaffney jumped from Libya to Israel, and Palin plastered herself with Israeli flags.

Seth Masket compared Japan to New Orleans, we viewed the tsunami from a boat, and XKCD charted radiation dosages. Schools traded calories for IQ points, Simone Eastman bemoaned being the poster couple for gay marriage, and Freddie DeBoer wondered why a longread on gentrification didn't feature any poor people. Readers fell on opposite sides of tasteless jokes, medical workers shared tales of laughter in hardship, and Felix Salmon argued the paywall will prevent people going to the NYT in an emergency. Andrew 80's-gasmed, and the arms trade landed in stoners' hands.

Billboard of the day here, quotes for the day here and here, nit-pick of the day here, chart of the day here, Malkin award here, MHB here, FOTD here, and some pure joy here.

–Z.P.

… some pure joy: