Judgment Day Is Upon Us

The paywall approaches. Slowly, the New York Times has been changing the links on the website. It's just a naming convention that reflects the way the Times servers find the files that are displayed on your browser.

Web sites do this from time to time for various reasons, but you wouldn't be doing it when you're about to do another big change to the web site. They're doing it slowly, timidly lest something break. And there was the first vague target of after New Year's, which was moved to the end of the quarter -- just two or three weeks away.

I understand their desire to be cautious. Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation looked like bunglers when when their new online paper, the Daily, was delayed a few weeks. Consequently, it's reasonable that the paper is tight-lipped about the date, and about the terms. It was amusing to read the Times's public editor complain about the lack of news in his column a few days ago called "The News You Didn't Read Here".

Surprise! The Times is a for-profit corporation that doesn't want to screw this up. I also imagine it wants to make the most out of readers' habits. News reading, I'm afraid, is a habit for many. I don't know if user surveys and focus groups even ask if people read the paper because they always used to read it. If I were the Times, I wouldn't want people to think about it too much. They are going to allow casual readers see a few stories every day. They've got numbers to pore over, but I don't know if the numbers will tell them what passes through peoples' minds when they idly click on something. A click doesn't mean that the clicker is thinking, Sure, I'd pay 50 cents to read this (or whatever the cost would be).

What is surprising is that the Times's competitors don't say anything. This is a pretty good story, but no one is able to dig anything up. There's really not much to be done if the principals have no motive to say anything.

The outcome will be interesting. I think the decision is likely to bite the Times, but at the same time show how valuable the news is. That may sound paradoxical, but if the Times can't make this work, they will have to pull back, and then we'll all lose something, and we won't like it -- at least I won't like it -- but I can't afford to shell out $20 and $30 each month for all these businesses with their hands out. Of course, if they succeed, they'll be heroes to every publisher in the Western world.

Wall Street doesn't seem enthusiastic about this, either. After a spike in the stock price when the Times announced its quarterly results, the share prices has been sagging. To me, advertisers don't seem too impressed either. Some days there's a fair amount; other days it's almost all house ads.

It's been a long wait. Publishers have been considering this move for a very long time. In 1996, the Times ran a news story that said, "Recently, publishers including Time Warner, The Wall Street Journal, a unit of Dow Jones & Company and The New York Times Company have all said they would soon begin charging for some of their Web site information." Read it. What allowed the Journal to charge, and what stopped the rest of them?

I understand that no one can afford to keep a slew of people scattered around the world to report on civil war in Libya and the tsunami in Japan out of the goodness of their hearts. But no one is going to guarantee publishers a big profit just because they're publishers and once printed newspapers.

My hunch has always been that the news has tremendous value to many people, but that the newspaper is archaic. In almost 20 years, the publishers have been fooling around with putting a representation of the paper edition on the web, grudgingly accepting some Internet conventions. They're doing an OK job with the 24-hour idea, which of course the wires, radio and television have done for decades. But no newspaper has quite become an Internet operation.

In the past two months, I've read the paper closely, and I see that it's still much the same collection of news and features that cost 50 cents back then. I threw most of the pages out then unread, and it hasn't changed. Back then we didn't have a choice. It was all or nothing. The situation is much different today.

The most interesting thing about my experiment is how much I liked doing it. The focus on the one newspaper started to feel stale. My interest in what's happening in the world soared. I like writing these pieces, and I like researching them. I've decided to regroup and start a blog that's not constrained by one narrow question. My last piece, on Tuesday, had nothing to do with the Times, but a lot about the news. I'm preparing a couple of new pieces, and I'm setting up a new venue. I'll post a note here when the new site is ready, this weekend.

Oh, will I buy a Times's subscription? It depends. Does the Times have so much that is unique and important that I will need to read it in order to make sense out of events? What do you think?