How much would you pay for news?

By David Montgomery
Published/Last Modified on Wednesday, Jan 20, 2010 - 03:53:55 pm CST

The New York Times announced today it will, by 2011, start charging for access to its Web site.

Readers will get a certain number of article views for free and have to pay a flat fee beyond that.

Print subscribers will get free access as part of their subscription.

The Times says this is necessary because even with 20 million unique readers they're not making any money on Web advertising.

As a journalist who gets paid out of newspaper company revenue, I'm sympathetic to attempts to increase revenue that don't involve compromising my reporting integrity. But as a voracious news consumer I'm loath to give up my current access to hundreds of different high quality news sources.

Then again, as a news reporter I like my content to be free because I like people to talk about my stories, and free content spreads wider. And as a poorly paid journalist I might be able to afford one or two online news subscriptions but couldn't pay a few dollars a month to each of the dozens of news sources I read.

How much would I pay for unlimited access to nytimes.com? I might pay as much as $10 a month, but I wouldn't be happy about it. And I can't see most readers outside the greater New York area being willing to pay more than that, either. I really think $5 a month is the sweet spot for a high-quality paper like the Times that's also selling ads.

(Of course, that's a lot less than it costs to subscribe to the print edition of a newspaper. The Capital Journal, if you subscribe for a year, costs $10 a month — though that includes costs for printing and delivery that a web site largely doesn't have. The print edition of a local newspaper also provides a lot more content than the five to 10 NYTimes.com articles I might read per day.)

If all quality online news sources started charging, I'd be willing to pay $20-$40 a month for a subscription to all of them — I view that as a service on par with a cable TV subscription.

How much would you pay for access to the New York Times, or your preferred news source of choice?

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Comments

1 comment(s)

TD wrote on Jan 20, 2010 6:07 PM:

" I'm not sure how much I'd pay. Like you, I usually only read about 5 - 10 articles from the Times - and that is the most (its usually just 1 or 2). I like the idea of 5 bucks. That I could handle.

However, I think this points to a much bigger problem. People want the news and they want good news. They want good reporters to work hard and find good stories - but they are not willing to pay for it. With the internet, most people feel that everything should be free because it has been. "

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