Over on the Silicon Alley Insider today, Henry Blodgett makes the case that The New York Times needs to start charging a subscription fee for full access to the newspaper’s extremely popular website. Given what a lifeblood of content it is for this blog (and most others), the answer is a no-brainer ‘yes’ for us, but we’re curious to see where readers come down on the issue.


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. I get the Times M-F on my kindle, which is fantastic, as I can easily read it on the train. It’s $13/month. My husband reads the Times during the week on his IPod Touch.

    We still get the paper paper delivered on the weekends.

    We are both happy to cut way down on our paper recycling, and my husband would pay for the IPod content if it came to that.

    We both have our problems with the Times, but as others have said, the world will be a much scarier place if news reporting budgets continue to get smaller and smaller–we need investigative journalists as well as reporters in far-flung places. AM New York ain’t gonna pick up the slack.

    There are news sites and blogs I read all the time, but they are frequently linking to stories from newspapers or the wire services. It’s unfair to expect that we can get high quality news content for free. If journalism’s main source of support becomes online advertising, we’re in deep trouble.

  2. I’m out of state but used to have it delivered daily. I now read it online, but its not really the same as having the print version. However, I would gladly pay $80 – for ideology and all – to continue the important function the NY Times provides. I’m in Seattle, and our newspapers are just not that interesting. And it looks like one of them will be out of business shortly.

  3. $80 a year is not that much, I would pay it. The changes to the NYT people are complaining about here very likely came about because of dwindling profits over the years. To not buy newspapers, this one or any others, and justify it by pointing out the changes and compromises that occur because those publications are struggling, that’s a little funny to me.