[DeletedUser]

I was of the opposite view that their paywall was working. They are on their (at least) third iteration of it and by the data shown, it looked to me as if the only increase in revenue was from circulation print. Also, I have not experienced any “lock-outs” from their website on reading articles , though I do receive notifications on specials to subscribe. Their most recent one is a ” Spring Special ” for a dollar a week. So this makes me question do they even have a paywall in operation currently? I have not experienced it lately, at least I have seen no mention of “X” amount of articles remaining and I have not been locked out from anything I have tried to view. One paper that I know of that I for sure run into limited online article viewings per week/month is Forbes. I believe the Wall Street Journal is the same as this, but being that I have been subscribed to them for quite an amount of time, I could not 100% say if this is a fact. Forbes is definitely a fact. 4 per week without a sub.

I definitely agree with you that online news stories should be free. I would think that many of their subscribers were hard copy subscribers that got sold the dream of “buy an iPad and all of your content will me magically available to you, all in one easy to access place”. I believe they have tried to structure their paywall around this and did not read far enough ahead into the future to just what content would eventually be available on that same iPad….for free. Now, their one save for the upcoming digital age and their “eggs in one basket” approach with that iPad is turning into nothing short of their executioner. Why would anyone pay for a service to receive an article that they can now get, on that same iPad, for free, from 3 dozen alternate media outlets? A hard core New York Times fan for sure, but the number of media outlets has increased exponentially since the New York Times started out.

I just don’t believe newspapers saw this coming, at least not as fast as it did.