The New York Times 'gets it'

Oh, the pleasures in life: The New York Times now allows free access to almost all of their material. I used to spend lots of time reading the NYT online, and now that they have re-opened up their material (opinions, etc.) they are back on my very short Bookmarks menu (I use del.icio.us to manage most bookmarks: here are my personal del.icio.us bookmarks).

The NYT has clearly made the decision to go for more readers, and hope that advertising revenue makes up for subscription fees. In a small way, I do the same thing: after writing 14 published books, I put almost all of my writing effort into material that I simply give away for free - not totally altruistic: I earn my living as a consultant and having more people visit my site probably helps my bottom line about as much as book royalties.

While I understand that people working for companies like SAP or Microsoft might have a different viewpoint than mine because of where they see their personal revenue stream coming from, I believe that business and commerce works better when we all build on each other's open source projects, Creative Commons material, etc.

Comments

  1. This is great news for fans of the NYT but also a strong signal to the rest of Big Media, n'est-ce-pas?

    ReplyDelete

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