Category: news

NY Times pricing

When I subscribed to the NY Times a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that they had recently dropped their prices. I had gone looking for any articles that might mention when and why they had done that, but didn’t find any. (For some reason, I’m interested in the economics of pricing on digital vs physical goods, like ebooks, music, and newspaper subscriptions. In addition to just wanting to get a good deal for myself.)

There’s an article on Mashable today noting the new pricing, as available in the iOS apps. The article says that it’s an “iOS only offer”, but I know that I saw pretty much the same rates on the web when I subscribed, with the addition of the extra 30% off for the first year. And it seems like the offer showed up in the app only within the last few days, but I know that I saw it in the app at least three weeks ago. And I just checked now, and if I open a new private browsing window in Firefox and look at the Times subscription page, it shows the old tiered rates ($3.75, $5, and $8.75 a week, for phone, tablet, and all-digital tiers).

So, basically, I think the Times is messing around with targeted pricing for different people on different platforms. They probably had data on me that showed me using the iPhone and iPad apps occasionally, and the web frequently, and saw that I’d been looking at the subscription page on and off but never actually subscribing. So they tossed different offers at me until I went ahead and subscribed. Even though I block a lot of tracking stuff with Privacy Badger, I had generally been leaving myself logged in to the NY Times site (and apps), even before I had a paid subscription. So I’m sure they have data on my usage of their site and apps.

And I guess they decided to throw the cheaper all-digital rate at all iOS app users and see what happens. I know that the Times has a lot more paid digital subscribers than most other papers, and they’ve been fairly successful at getting people to pay for their content. It will be interesting to see how this stuff plays out over the next few years.

paying for news

I’ve been thinking about the ways in which I consume news lately. I read The NY Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, and The Guardian, with varying degrees of frequency, online (obviously), and I haven’t been paying for any of them. I’ve had print subscriptions to each of them (except The Guardian) in the past. I probably read the NY Times more often than any of the others.

This past week’s junk mail included offers to subscribe (in print) to the New Yorker and Economist at discount rates. I was somewhat tempted to do that, but I still have a small pile of unread New Yorker issues from my previous print subscription, in 2013. (I’m still working my way through them, and enjoying a lot of the articles, even if they’re a bit out of date.)

I’ve thought about signing up for a digital subscription to the Times on a number of occasions, but it’s always seemed a bit too expensive. And they’ve had this weird tiered system, where you pay one rate for a web & iPhone subscription, a higher rate for web & iPad, and an even higher rate for “all-digital access”. Well, I noticed today that they seem to have given up on that and set the all-digital rate to the old web & iPhone rate of $3.75 a week. And they had an offer for 30% off for the first year. So that’s a little over $10/month, which isn’t bad. I’ll have to review it next year when it goes up to $15/month.

So now I can read as many Times articles as I want, on any device I want, without jumping through any hoops to get around the 10 article per month limit on freeloaders. I also want to think about better ways to find and read articles from the Times that would be interesting and/or useful to me. I already subscribe to a couple of Times newsletters, and have one IFTTT recipe set up, using the NY Times channel. I could probably set up a few more. I also follow a few Times feeds on Twitter, but I’ve noticed that those usually only promote a certain kind of content, and don’t really help with the stuff that’s buried a bit deeper in the paper.

Long ago, when I had a print subscription to the Times, I actually went through the whole paper (or at least a good chunk of it) every day, skimming through all the headlines and reading at least a half-dozen articles every day. And I’d spend at least a couple of hours on the Sunday paper each week. (Heck, on a rainy day like today, I could spend nearly the whole day reading the paper.) I’d like to get back into the habit of reading and keeping up with the news at a bit of a deeper level this year. I’m never going to go back to reading the Times “dead tree” edition on a daily basis, but hopefully I can come up with a system for surfacing and reading the stuff that’s interesting to me in a way that’s convenient and useful.

Amazon confusion

There has been much already written in reaction to the big article about Amazon that ran in the NY Times over the weekend. I’ll admit that the article really bothered me. It seems like most of the news about the ways in which Amazon treats its employees, contractors, and suppliers over the last few years has been overwhelmingly negative. Enough that it almost seems immoral to continue doing business with them as a customer.

Some of the reaction to the article has been pretty funny, such as this tweet from Dr. Drang or this article by Andy Borowitz from the New Yorker.

The response from Jeff Bezos seems reasonable, and this second follow-up item from GeekWire gives a little more perspective from the employee level. So the truth is in there somewhere — it’s probably not all as bad as the NY Times piece makes it out to be, but there are likely some bad managers and bad teams at the company, and a culture that sometimes allows that kind of thing to grow and thrive.

So I think I can continue to order my Breathe-Right strips from Amazon without being too concerned that I’m propping up a company that’s completely morally bankrupt. Still, I’ve been thinking about Amazon alternatives for some time now. But there aren’t a lot of good ones, in certain areas.

For books, I was looking at Abe Books and Book Depository, but they’re both owned by Amazon, so that doesn’t really help. Barnes & Noble is an option, but I’m not sure they’re better than Amazon, just less successful. Powell’s is probably a good option, and not owned by Amazon, as far as I can tell.

For ebooks, the picture is even less clear. I’ve had a Kindle since the very first model, and I really like the things. About the only real competitor to the Kindle now is Kobo. They’ve got a pretty good product in the Glo HD, judging from some of the reviews I’ve read. In terms of actual ebooks, Kobo’s bookstore looks pretty good, but I’m guessing their selection likely isn’t nearly as large as Amazon’s.

For general merchandise, I could go to Walmart.com, but I sure can’t make a case for Walmart being a better choice, morally, than Amazon.

So, in a nutshell, I’m not dropping my Amazon Prime subscription just yet. But I am alarmed about how large they’ve gotten, and how little competition they seem to have left, in certain areas, like books and ebooks. I’m going to try to give more of my business to smaller retailers, when I can. And I’m going to continue to try to buy DRM-free ebooks when possible, so it’ll be easier for me to switch away from the Kindle ecosystem if I ever decide to do that.

Poor old RPI

This article from Vice News does a pretty good job of showing how my old alma mater, RPI, has become an almost perfect example of all the things that have gone wrong with college education in America. Overpaid executives, growing tuition, growing student-to-faculty ratios, growing administrator-to-faculty ratios, and so on.

If I was a high school senior today, coming from a fairly modest middle-class background, I really don’t think I would want to even consider RPI. And if I did want to go there, I don’t think I could afford it, without taking on some crippling student debt. Which wouldn’t be worth it, since the quality of the undergraduate education really isn’t good enough to support that kind of high tuition. I’d likely get a better education at Rutgers or NJIT.

In memoriam: Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA

From a good article about the impending end of The Colbert Report:

…the real heart of The Colbert Report had little to do with actual politics — it was far more a critique of modern discourse, where people refuse to agree on the facts. And, more importantly, it shed light on the complete absurdity of the world with enough levity to keep us from going insane.

via In memoriam: Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA | Stanford Daily.

WSJ redesign

The Wall Street Journal launched their (print) redesign today. The paper looks good, and has not been turned into USA Today, which I guess was the main thing that people were worried about. There were some pretty good articles in the paper today, too, including one on Virgin Comics. I actually haven’t gotten around to reading any of their titles yet, but I’ve heard good things about Snakewoman. The article was accurate and reasonably well-written, but the headline used one of the standard comic book newspaper article cliches: “Holy [fill in the blank] Batman!” In this case, it was: “Holy Heroes of Indian Lore, Batman!” OK, so maybe they *are* starting to resemble USA Today in some ways. Oh well.

The Small Street Journal

BusinessWeek has an article about the changes coming to the Wall Street Journal in 2007. I had a suspicion that something was changing, since I got a letter in the mail today offering a year’s print *and* online subscription for only $99. Usually, the online subscription alone is $99. I’ve had an online subscription for a few years, but I let it lapse a couple of months ago. I may sign up for the new deal. It’s been a while since I subscribed to an old-fashioned daily paper. Not that I’ll have time to read it.

Zunafish

Well, I signed up for Lala and posted some stuff yesterday. We’ll see how that goes.
There was an article about Zunafish in the NY Times today, and now I’m curious about that too. Zunafish lets you trade DVDs, books, and other stuff, not just CDs like Lala. But it seems to be less flexible, if I understand things correctly.