I'm inclined to disagree.

What the expression "today it's news, tomorrow it's fishwrap" really shows is that the markets for current (say, less than 30 days old) new stories and the market for archived news are very very different.

People for whom old newspapers are fishwrap are not only not interested in not buying them, they are not interested in reading them at all. Thus, they play no role in decisions about whether or not to charge for archived editions. The argument for the Times current approach would be that the commercial audience for an archived online edition is larger than the commercial audience for a current online edition. It is, at the very least, not obviously incorrect.

But the mechanism seems to me to be this. If the Times continues to offer its current online edition for free, it maximizes the number of people who know things because they read them in a Times article. If they wish to cite a source for a fact that they read in a Times article later, they can either go looking for the same information somewhere else, or they can pay for access to the article they initially read, now somewhere in the Times' archive.

This bit:

News is increasingly a substitutable good: there are so many ways to get the basic facts on an article, from Yahoo's AP wire to the Sydney Morning Herald to pastebombed articles in the archives of mailing lists like Interesting People and Politech that a savvy searcher or blogger has no good reason to pick the NYT to get a set of basic facts on any subject.

applies equally well to current editions and archived editions. But if one feels one must charge for one or the other, the free current edition "sets the hook" for the non-free archived edition, and not vice versa....

Closing the archive of the New York Times after 7 days, not 30 days but 7 days, is more than foolish. The Times is a superb newspaper, and I subscribe to it happily while also using the NYTimes site regularly. But, though I can and do clip and save print articles, I can not refer to articles on the internet more than 7 days old. The idea of paying for the articles is absurd, for they are interesting and useful but not critical, and the cost is excessive.

Whoever

Go ahead and pay 3 dollars for last week's article, a single article, from the Times. Duh. What foolishness.

Anne

Just send a NYTimes article to yourself and you have it for as long as you wish. I use a Gmail account to store article from the Times, and I also subscribe to the print edition but would never think of paying for the archives. The Times is being foolish.

The fact that Cory et al. are up in arms over the archives being behind a paywall demonstrates that the archives are valuable. Now, maybe the Times is not using the best method of realizing the value of the archives and a keyword advertising system would be better. But it's their product.

As a side note, those of us fortunate enough to belong to the New York Public Library System have ready access to the archives of the Times and many other publications for free. Check what database subscriptions your own library system has.

Just for the record, this is wrong: "even if a thousand bloggers point to a great article on the day it comes out, thirty days later it will be invisible to the 99.999 percent of the Web who won't pay for access to fishwrap, no matter how interesting." The NYT allows us to create permanent links to its articles; just go here: http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink . It is, of course, harder to find the unbelievable quote you read a month ago but didn't save, which has now suddenly become apropos, of course.

http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink

This is terrific. Thank you!

Though I have access to Lexis Nexis in our research library, I think this link is superior. I can use this at home :)

Cory says: "The problem with the NYT's system is that it ensures that the Times can't be the paper of record any longer, because even if a thousand bloggers point to a great article on the day it comes out, thirty days later it will be invisible to the 99.999 percent of the Web who won't pay for access to fishwrap, no matter how interesting."

Wow, that's quite a lot of arrogant blogger triumphalism there. The NY Times was "the paper of record" long before it was possible to view it online. Whether or not it remains the paper of record has nothing to do with bloggers, at all.

Whether it remains the paper of record depends on the quality of the journalism. After all, OTHER news outlets have access to the back articles, through Lexis-Nexis, etc. And businesses also have access to the back articles.

Cory thinks that all newspaper coverage is created equal, and will contain equivalent amounts of factual content. This is clearly not true.

As to whether or not it's in the Times' interest to keep things behind the firewall, that gets into the "long tail" argument - no particular old article is likely to generate much income, but the combined income from all old articles is likely to be significant.

JDC writes: "The fact that Cory et al. are up in arms over the archives being behind a paywall demonstrates that the archives are valuable."

Yeah, this seems to be a new approach: "Nobody wants it, so you MUST give it to me." Also other arguments that old works with no apparent market should be made public-domain.

Taken to extremes, of course, you'd get publishers opting to not buy the rights to books, waiting for the unadvertised work to "fail" in the marketplace, then taking the now-public domain work and publishing it, with lots of marketing, and without having to pay a royalty to the author.

After the grumble, the New York Times is a wonderful paper; the paper of record for me. I look forward to it every day and read it thoroughly. Still, a grumble now and then is in order. Sending Times articles from the Arts to Science to friends is a pleasure, and the easier the access to files the more articles I will send. What is critical however is that the quality of the writing be maintained and in that I am confident.

The New York Times has just changed its email policy, making it far harder to email articles to friends. This is horrid!

My pet peave is that academic journals often make it impossible to have any access to their archives. Many simply don't have any, even though it would take relatively little effort to have someone scan them in. Most of those that do make them available only through libraries and there is no apparent way that an individual can just buy one article at a time at any price. Some do allow this, but most don't. I don't understand why so many journals are passing up this easy money-making opportunity.

[Let me second this: For example, The _Journal of Economic Perspectives_ should be open to the world, rather than used as an AEA membership drive tool...]

Darn. The New York Times really may be harming itself terribly. The entire email format has just now been changed in a way that makes it vastly less useful for sending friends articles. What are they thinking?

Well, evidently Brad was right as usual. The New York Times wishes to be irrelevant. To change the emmail format so a full article can not be sent is truly awful.

As long as they have a real estate section (on Sunday) there will be a reason to buy the Times. (Job listings are also an interesting bonus)

There is always a reason to buy the NYTimes, but that is different than the Times destroying the use of website by those who do buy the Times.

People don't use craigslist in New York?

I actually wouldn't mind paying for articles, but the charge for those articles needs to be based on a real-world assessment of their value. For most articles, we're talking about 5 to 10 cents. The trouble is that nobody has yet devised a way for such small transactions to make economic sense.

Wow, this is a remarkably uninformed post. You usually hear it from college freshmen who can't believe that yesterday's paper is worth anything -- until they want a copy of it themselves.

The truth is, old articles are money in the bank. They're as much a newspaper's backlist as yesterday's bestseller.

There are huge -- huuuuuuuuuge! -- companies like Lexis-Nexis whose stock in trade is to make this material available -- at a price. Newspapers and magazines would sooner give away their print edition than let go of the historical material.

To think that you could fund everything through web advertising is really a 90's style business model.

It's far more worthwhile to look at how copyright can be tamed to make this material eventually available -- in the public domain. The problem isn't that I can't look up last month's article -- it's that I can't look up an article from 75 years ago. Now that's a disgrace!

P.S. Ditto on the arrogance comment.

OK, here are three words I've never seen in webprint before:

pastebombed, staledate, paywalls.

Now, I could figure out the meaning of each from it's context, but should I have to? Is it really ok to just invent words when it's convenient?

I dunno, I'm just asking.?

Oh, I just made up "webprint". . .

I am of the habit of emailing myself articles from the times, chicago tribune, etc. to keep in a folder of articles. The Times just switched (today I think) to a linked article email system where you don't get the full text, you get a link to article. I guess I'll wait and see if in 30 days I can still read the articles I send myself. Half the point of the digital age is that if you want to save something, you don't have to keep a folder full of news clippings. The Times needs to stick with the times.

You can always just cut and paste the text of an article into an email. It's easiest from the print-friendly version screen. Then you don't have to worry about an expiring link or whatever.