[ojbyrne]

"I could have loved the way news works on this thing, if the NY Times and been willing to ship a beautiful reverse-chronologic view of their whole news stream. They chickened out with a little mini-dip-into the stream. It's like sipping the news from an espresso cup when I want to be inundated by Niagara Falls."

It seems clear that big media sees this as the last chance to provide news "samples" in the hopes of rolling back the clock to 1995 and getting us to pay for the whole thing. Somehow the lesson of the web has been lost to them.

Having worked at a newspaper I know the rule back in the early nineties was - consumers pay for the cost of distribution, advertisers pay for everything else. They need to accept that the cost of distribution is heading to zero, and that's what consumers will pay.

[warwick]

If that's going to work, they're going to have to charge advertisers sufficiently high rates. Online advertising rates are a joke compared to print ad rates.

It seems absurd to me that newspapers are willing to ask individual consumers to pay for online distribution, but aren't willing to have their online ads department use the phrase "Yes, you can put your ads on some random blog for almost nothing, but we're the New York Times. We have a premium audience, and advertising with us goes for premium rates."

[btipling]

I definitely agree that big publishers need to charge more for views for the ads. I don't think a site like the nytimes.com needs to go for cheap or even worry about pay per click. Just charge a bucketload for the views. It's the New York Times.

[ojbyrne]

Indeed. If they had put the effort into getting premium rates from advertisers starting the day they went online, they'd be there now. Instead recent experimentation with new insterstitial formats suggests its just beginning.

[cromulent]

Strange that the timeswire page wasn't enough of a reverse-chronological view of the NYT news stream for Dave.

http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/12/markThisDay.html

[KC8ZKF]

I don't think the general public is interested in a reverse-chronological view of the entire news stream to begin with.