07 Mar 12 Does the New York Times want us to share Reuters/AP stories less?
Why does the New York Times have different sharing options for wire stories compared to stories written by Times staffers?
Look at the differences on these articles and the sharing section in each (highlighting boxes are mine):
Here’s another set of articles, the one on the left from Reuters and the one on the right by New York Times writer Mark Landler:
Two different sections of the Times with the only different element being Reuters/AP vs. staff post.
Very clearly, the social box on the NYTimes articles proper encourages sharing to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and leaving a comment while the equivalent space for the wire stories allows for only email, sending to phone and printing.
In both cases, you can of course share the article via direct link on the social platform of your choice but doing is not encouraged.
I’ve put in a call to the New York Times main line and received no response on this but if anyone has any idea why this is true, I’m curious!
Tags: ap, associated press, Facebook, linkedin, new york times, reuters, sharing, social, social media, Twitter
06 Jul 09 There’s always another way
I recently read two great pieces of journalism online. One was Matt Taibbi’s scathing account of Goldman Sachs’ role in various financial bubbles, published in Rolling Stone. The other was Michael Lewis’ piece on AIG and how one group there in particular figured large in the insurance giant’s fall. That one appeared in Vanity Fair.
Thing is, I didn’t read either of those articles on their respective content magazine’s website. I read Taibbi’s article on DocStoc (here) and I read Lewis’ report on Scribd (here).
Even as newspapers are in great number considering the return of the Pay Wall, there will always be a solution to find free content. There will always be a free and easy way to access these articles, even if Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair decide not to allow readers to see the entire articles on their websites– which in this case they did. (You’ll see, for example, the URL for the Michael Lewis piece gives a few hundred words of text and then some bullet points summarizing the rest of the article).
It seems that most content providers don’t seem to understand that cease-and-desist letters are not going to cut it. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about print/words, movies/television or music. I can point you to an endless numbers of sites to stream, download and share all sorts of media and content. It is not limited to any one medium or any one company.
Point is: unless there is some brilliant way to implement Web-wide micropayments (and even then, who knows), dropping a Pay Wall or blocking off content simply is not a smart idea.
Brief Update/Addendum: I just saw this on Mark Cuban’s blog (via @rfurlan) and I 100% agree. It doesn’t go against what I’m saying in terms of consumers, but it certainly rounds out the picture from a profit sustainability standpoint. I should also add that one final lens through which to view all this is with Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, and Malcolm Gladwell’s critical review which you can read, free of charge, here.
Tags: docstoc, download, journalism, Media, micropayments, news, newspapers, pay wall, rolling stone, scribd, sharing, streaming, vanity fair
