Posts Tagged ‘Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’

The New York Times finally announced the details for its paywall, which will take effect March 28.

Users will be able to read 20 articles per month free-of-charge, after which they can pay $15 per month for access to the website, $20 for the Web and an iPad app, and $35 for access via all digital platforms. Home-delivery subscribers will receive free access to all platforms except e-readers (Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook).

Visits through search engines or social-networking sites will not count toward the 20-article monthly limit, but there will be a cap of five articles per day via Google.

The Times added that the paywall will be enacted immediately for users in Canada, to allow it to test operations and handle software issues before March 28.

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The New York Times has been busy plugging leaks in its soon-to-deploy paywall, as Bloomberg reports that it discovered some 700 glitches and has repaired approximately 500 of them thus far.

The paywall is slated to be implemented by March, and remaining issues include how the system will determine who must pay and at which point the paywall takes effect, according to Bloomberg.

One potential hiccup, according to Bloomberg: The Times plans to charge users after they have viewed a certain number of stories, but those directed to the site from social networks such as Facebook can view unlimited stories.

Times spokesman Robert Christie told Bloomberg the issues are “routine,” adding, “This is a massive, massive technical undertaking.”

And Silver Spring, Md.-based newspaper consultant and analyst John Morton told Bloomberg, “The Times‘ Web site gets a lot of visitors, and they don’t want to drive those people away. Everybody is watching them to see how they do it.”

At a conference in Munich, Germany, last week, The New York Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said, “We believe that enough people will pay, but we will not cut ourselves off from the rest.”

The annual Reuters Global Media Summit starts Monday and runs through Thursday in New York, London, Paris, Mumbai, and Taipei, featuring exclusive, private interviews with top executives from media and entertainment companies.

Content from the four-day event can be found on its site, and Reuters Insider subscribers will have exclusive access to live recordings of the interviews.

Executives scheduled to participate include: Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes; Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman; Publicis CEO Maurice Levy; News Corp. deputy chairman, president, and chief operating officer Chase Carey; Financial Times CEO John Ridding; Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello; WPP CEO Martin Sorrell; Disney-ABC Television Group president Anne Sweeney; Pearson chief financial officer Robin Freestone; Star TV India (News Corp) CEO Uday Shankar; Vocento CEO Jose Manuel Vargas; Penguin Books CEO John Makinson; United States Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun; Next Media CEO Jimmy Lai; Kabel Deutschland CEO Adrian von Hammerstein; World Wrestling Entertainment COO Donna Goldsmith; Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick; The New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; The New York Times CEO Janet Robinson; Take-Two Interactive chairman Strauss Zelnick; Technicolor CEO Frederic Rose; MLB Network CEO Tony Petitti; Major League Baseball Advanced Media CEO Robert Bowman; Informa CEO Peter Rigby; DiBcom CEO Yannick Levy; Motorola Mobility president Daniel Moloney; Blinkx founder and CEO Suranga Chandratillake; and JCDecaux co-CEO and chairman Jean-Charles Decaux.

The war in Iraq was the subject of the most news links shared by bloggers during the week of Sept. 6-10, while a report on Mashable about The New York Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. saying he expects to stop publishing a print edition of The New York Times in the future was the most-Tweeted news link, and the most-watched news and politics video on YouTube was an episode of YouTube-based The Philip DeFranco Show, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index.

The ongoing conflict in Iraq accounted for 25 percent of news links shared via the blogosphere, and it was followed by: news about the White House of President Barack Obama, including rumors about chief of staff Rahm Emanuel leaving the administration and the Oval Office rug, at 22 percent; a story from the Los Angeles Times about the possibility that a school named for former Vice President Al Gore was built over toxic and contaminated soil, at 12 percent; two 2010 election stories from The Washington Post, at 11 percent; and the plan by the Rev. Terry Jones to burn the Koran on Sept. 11 at 10 percent.

Sulzberger’s vision of permanently stopping the presses accounted for 17 percent of news links shared via Twitter, and it was followed by: another offering from Mashable about abducted Japanese journalist Kosuke Tsuneoka using a captor’s cell phone to Tweet his location, at 15 percent; the Koran-burning controversy at 13 percent; several Google-related stories, including those on new search feature Google Instant, at 10 percent; and a report that Apple was lifting its ban on Flash apps for the iPhone, at 7 percent.

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Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of The New York Times Company, said at his keynote address at the WebbyConnect conference on Wednesday that today’s news overload could actually be a boon to old school media companies, CNET News reports.

“Our 21st-century news cycle, with its trials and tribulations, feels even more immediate because of our access,” he said. “It is reasonable to ask: Do we need all this news and information? Do we want all this news and information? Can we tolerate all this news and information?

“Now that everyone is in their end-of-the-world mode,” he continued, “we should make a conscious effort to reject the increasingly frenzied ‘apocalypse now, tomorrow, and forever’ talk… Quality content matters… trustworthy voices are more important than they have ever been.”

He said that as an industry “we can’t care” if newspapers don’t exist in 10 years, responding to a question from WebbyConnect organizer David-Michel Davies, saying that instead “we must be where people want us for our information. It’s the thought of cannibalizing yourself before somebody else cannibalizes you.”