Thursday, January 15, 2009

Are We Killing the Gray Lady?

Most of you have probably heard about the ongoing problems that have been assaulting print journalism as of late, what with this glorious interweb just chock full of easily accessible (and free) content (and us annoying bloggers who link to it all everyday).

In particular, the New York Times is taking a beating in the media these past few weeks... The Atlantic has gone out on a limb and reported that the Gray Lady's death could come as early as this May. Click here to check out the piece... it's worth taking a look at.

A bit of positive press for the New York Times came in the form of a New York Magazine article about the "cybergeeks" who work behind the scenes alongside reporters each day to produce multimedia content and bring a certain degree of interactivity to the Times. Click here to check out the article.

We, like many other news junkies, cannot image a world (more specifically, a New York) without the New York Times. However, we must admit that we are not subscribers. Like tons of bloggers, we visit their website freakishly often throughout the day and regularly do posts featuring Times' content, but we do not pay a dime for all the content we use. I know, we're terrible people.

So, BoogieDowner would like to use this as fodder for a new survey: Would you pay to access the website of the New York Times? If so, how much?

We can honestly say that if the New York Times cut us off cold turkey from their site, like any good junky we'd do anything in our power to get our hands on the good stuff. So yes, we'd pay to subscribe as long as it was under $100/year.

What about you? Click on the survey on the upper-right hand side of the homepage to let us know.

~ErLu

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would pay, but likely only if I could read the online version ad-free, and if there were usage options that made my online membership more valuable, such as personalized alerts, content suggestions based upon profile and the ability to re-organize the frontpage.

Anonymous said...

I would pay. It is the most decent news paper or web news out there.