It is sad to see the old “grey lady” make such an obvious attempted to take her life. I can’t help but look back at the good old days when the New York Times was the paper of record. You needed to have a subscription.
Then everything changed. The internet boom of the late 90’s came and then the information revolution that started about five years ago (Happy Birthday Twitter) made 98% of the Times content duplicated by online sources.
Traditional media outlets like the Times lagged in presenting viable online solutions and became less and less relevant to the conversation. Traditional media seemed to put their heads in the sand as the information revolution was taking place mistakenly thinking that demand for their content would not be affected. For a media company this was an irrational decision and the Times was not alone in trying to pretend that the print subscription model would prevail.
Now a whole generation is going by that will never have a newspaper (print) subscription. 98% of the Times content can by retrieved by such sites as CNN, Huffington Post, Boston.com and many others. The vast majority of NY Times online content becomes trivial.
Now the Times wants to charge $14.99 per month for a online subscription. This is madness. They could possible get away with .99 cents per month but $14.99 is unprecedented, ridiculous and foolish.
Additional stress for the NY Times Company is that it is dragging the dead corpse of the Boston Globe which has been bleeding for a few years. An ironic thing is that the Globe has a “free” website (boston.com) that could compete with the pay walled Times site.
On announcement of the news of the new paywall the Times stock hit a three month low and I still would short it.
I keep asking myself why did such media companies such as the NY Times respond to the information revolution as it is 1985? The answer is that they have an outdated and arrogant view that they are still the “paper of record”.
At the wake of the old grey lady people will wax poectilly on how she was eclipsed by the “new media”. In the end she died of arrogance and pathology need to bury her head in the nostalgia of days gone by.
