The FT is going to start making its “online content free”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/business/media/01cnd-ft.html?ref=technology, sort-of:
The Web site of the London-based business newspaper, which currently charges for much of its content online, as of mid-October will allow users to get up to 30 articles a month for free, said John Ridding, chief executive of the newspaper. Anyone who wants to view more online material will have to subscribe to the site.
This is obviously intended to respond to Rupert Murdoch’s likely decision to open up the WSJ’s website to non-subscribers. I suspect that it is also a dipping-of-toes-in-water, and that the FT people are considering making the whole thing available and switching to an ads-based model (as dsquared pointed out in comments some months back, the print version is effectively carried by advertising aimed at a small – but extremely rich – sub-segment of its total readership). In any event, this is excellent news for anyone who wants to see high quality journalism made more widely available. The FT is a genuinely excellent newspaper, and its non-US coverage – especially its Europe coverage – is unparalleled. Ideally, it’ll respond to the Murdoch threat pro-actively rather than reactively – I’d like to see this going together with a beefing up of its US coverage and presence (although ideally not combined with the same kind of dodgy political pandering that the _Economist_ got up to when it started moving in on the US market). There’s a real gap in the US market for an intelligent, internationalist newspaper – and if Murdoch starts to dumb down the good bits (i.e. news pages) of the WSJ as he has done with every other property that he’s bought, that gap will widen dramatically.
{ 6 comments }
P O'Neill 10.01.07 at 6:22 pm
One thing I can’t tell is whether they intend to include articles that are currently free in the 30/month allowance. But it sounds like they mean the stuff that previously cost i.e. the analysis articles and the business section.
Interesting too that they cite the ability of bloggers to link as one consideration in the decision.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan 10.01.07 at 7:42 pm
“There’s a real gap in the US market for an intelligent, internationalist newspaper”
The CS Monitor, if it had better circulation, could fill that role.
We can get home delivery of the FT, so we get both it and the Monitor.
barrisj 10.01.07 at 8:33 pm
The NYT giving up its ill-considered “Select” op-ed subscription service went a long way in prompting other major news media with an on-line presence to pack in pay-for-view…and the Times’ decision no doubt was edged along by Murdoch’s WSJ plans. These people finally figured out that you don’t get the eyeballs with a subscription firewall in place.
harry b 10.01.07 at 10:16 pm
There’s a typo Henry. ‘The FT is a genuinely excellent newspaper’ should read ‘The FT is the genuinely excellent newspaper’. Unless there’s one I haven’t come across (relativized to English language, of course).
garhane 10.02.07 at 5:09 am
Hold the phone here, this sounds like an echo of an angry old 19th Century German pounding out words on a library table in the British Museum: “…the social conditions of production become absolutely incompatible with the institutions of private property…”
You do know what happens after that.
But just look at the poetry of it. That rotten Murdoch who grabbed the WSJ, itself a purveyor of the very worst wild reactionary rants—their editorial page was famous as the irrational while their practical business articles were considered the best—and now finds it is not good business to do the pay all who enter here route. Too rich for words.
Now we have to see Gates in an hysterical fury over the inroads of a hundred other guys, attempt to put out the operating system for free while creating a hundred hobbles for all customers to stumble over when they attempt to use it. Oh, he has already done that, hasn’t he?
Would it not be truly great to see these Mastodons race into a solid wall, one after the other.
mistah charley, ph.d. 10.03.07 at 1:22 pm
missus charley, m.d. and i get the Financial Times (we are by no means financiers, but it was an option to use airline miles about to expire) and we are favorably impressed with it, not only the reporting, but the cultural stuff and the commentary – the contrast of the editorial opinions with those expressed at the PRE-Murdoch WSJ is quite striking
my dad, retired army colonel charley, sr., has had a return to relative sociopolitical sanity since he stopped reading the WSJ a couple of years ago – now he sees how psychotic the still pro-bush views of my stepmother are – this has had the effect of intensifying his unhappiness with his second marriage – who knows if it’s good or bad?
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