A Requiem for My New York Times Home Subscription

Abstract

This very short (2000 words) online opinion piece addresses the question of why the author gave up home delivery of the New York Times. It argues that, quite apart from issues of political bias, the New York Times has successively moved to turn itself from a newspaper into a magazine, and, in facing the pressures of the Internet economic model, into a device for creating, caring for, and feeding the newspaper's "online communities" - a business model increasingly based on selling cultural participation in shared-bias-communities. The Times is moving toward a content model that presumes that its readers read it for free online, which is to say, the limited factual content that can be supported through the highly limited revenue stream of online ads - and the author has decided to pay at the discounted rate at which the Times, looking at the evolution of its content, values its readers. It increasingly treats its readers as online; why should anyone pay any different?

Keywords: New York Times, media, media economics, media business model, newspapers, newspaper economics, online advertising

JEL Classification: L82, L86, M87