Remember when people paid to read the news? asked Brett Pulley in Bloomberg Businessweek. The New York Times Co. does, and it wants to bring those days back. Starting on March 28, the Times Co. will ask its “avid, loyal, online readers” to pay if they read more than 20 articles a month. Under the somewhat complicated pricing plan, the Times Co. will charge readers $15 for four weeks’ unlimited access to NYTimes.com via computer or mobile phone, $20 for four weeks’ access via iPad or other tablet computer, or $35 for access via any device, including e-readers. It’s a crucial test for the company, and for its CEO, Janet Robinson. The 60-year-old executive wants to “create a new revenue stream” to replace lost newsstand sales and print-advertising revenues. Her career—and the future of the news business—could depend on her succeeding.
The effort is getting “an early boost” from one major advertiser, said Nat Worden and Jon Kamp in Dow Jones Newswires. Lincoln, Ford’s luxury brand, is offering to sponsor free digital subscriptions for 200,000 “heavy readers” of the Times’ website for 2011, with the Times giving Lincoln Web ads in return; the expectation is that about 100,000 readers will accept. Locking in those subscribers during the Times Co.’s “initial foray into the thorny business of getting consumers to pay” should help mitigate any sudden drop-off in online readers when the pay wall goes up. The stock market likes the plan, too. Times Co. shares jumped 3 percent after a Citigroup analyst upgraded the stock from Hold to Buy, reasoning that the company needs surprisingly few subscribers to offset revenue lost since the paper started hemorrhaging advertisers in 2007.
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