The Grey Lady Rent Asunder
What the New York Times’ strategy can tell us about the online reader and the future of the Paper of Record.
The New York Times premiered its newest app today, NYT Opinion, part of a broader subscription service called Op-Talk. It is your one stop shop for all things Op-Ed from the Times and elsewhere. Paul Smalera, the editor, states that the goal of Op-Talk is to “tip you off to the most interesting, provocative and compelling debates, opinions and viewpoints being offered each day. By summarizing and quoting from these reads, we hope to make it easier for you to discover points of view you might not otherwise have seen.”
Scrolling through the app for the first time, you see there are three sections: Today, Op-Talk, and My Reads. Today is a wide array of Opinion and Editorials (and Op-Eds) from the New York Times itself; essentially an app version of their website. The Op-Talk page takes stories from all over the web to give you wider array of editorials. Al Jazeera America, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Modern Farmer round out the initial offerings of this page. Lastly, My Reads is your saved articles, which in my case is the Ethicist and recipes.
The format may have you thinking you’re seeing double. That’s because it’s largely the same format as NYT Now, the general interest app that covers general interest journalism. Their sections, News, Our Picks, and Saved follow the same format. It should be noted that other than their modes of writing, the only difference is the price: $5.99 per month for nytOpinion and $7.99 for NYT Now (both are free to current subscribers). For the whole Times iPhone app, it is $14.99 per month which comes with full subscription to both apps and the website.
So why would the New York Times, an institution built on the principle that to find out what’s going on in the world you have to check just one place, be splitting up its paper?
The answer is obvious: we just don’t need that anymore. In an article that came out around the time NYT Now premiered, they revealed that “roughly half of The Times’s online traffic comes from mobile devices,” a figure that will likely increase over time. What it shows is that readers don’t need A1, or rather, don’t want it. They don’t want to be dictated to what’s important. They get to decide that.
Maybe ten years ago, the average internet user logged on and landed on Yahoo’s main page, or if they figured out how to change their Internet Explorer’s home page, maybe the Times or CNN.com, or some hub that got them a general overview of what was going on. It was the front page on the web. But now, most of us are constantly logged on. At homes and on our phones, and our home page is probably google.com.
It makes sense, then, that the Times would split up it’s services. Some people only want the news, some only want the opinion, and their betting that some want only their recipes—the third app coming out this summer is a food app. These distinct apps give readers on the go that option.
The bet is that, rather than pay the $500 a year for paper delivery, or even $180 for just the digital service, some would choose to pay $75 or $95 for the individual apps.
Competition, it seems, will come from Twitter, where the Times already has separate accounts for General, Opinion, Fashion, Technology, etc. What these apps are aiming to attack is the reader who will go over their ten article limit. (Most will have realized amounts to ten from each source; ten on the web, ten from the twitter app, ten from Facebook and so on, so you can really get them to add up).
The New York Times—the Grey Lady, is an essential document to the American way of life, it is the Paper of Record, all the news that’s fit to print. But circulation is down, and that 50% of mobile readers will have to make up the difference. With close to 800,000 digital only subscribers, the Times is the most successful digital newspaper. As Jordan Weissman notes in an article for Slate, other papers without pay-walls for their websites rely solely on advertising; and those profits are reaching sixty year lows.
Opposed to a seeing what sticks strategy, the Times seems to be focused on a singular strategy; tearing up the paper and giving the readers the sections that they wanted. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a future with a NYT Business, NYT Fashion, NYT Technology, the NYT Magazine turning into just that, a magazine. Each for a fraction of what the full subscription would cost, but only the information that you want. Editors would scour the internet for the best of the web, putting all of the information you want into one place.
What we’d end up with would be a bunch of little New York Times, with half of the articles outsourced. Eventually, they’ll package them all together, and we’ll have come full circle.
For now, we have the apps NYT Now & NYT Opinion, and, of course, NYTimes.com. Oh, and I still think they print the whole thing on paper.
