The thinking and dollars behind The New York Times’ new digital strategy

I have involved in several news media attempts to go into digital and worked on the launch of two paper newspapers that tried to make it in the early 2000&#x27;s both failed spectacularly.<p>One of them a high quality, amazing journalists high ambitions for quality content newspaper.<p>The other a free omnibus newspaper to be delivered to almost the entire country (Denmark)<p>I learned something very different from both of them but I draw the same conclusion.<p>News is the reporting of events. Newspapers whether digital or print is in the business of using these events to sell newspapers so they can sell adds.<p>But there are several problems with omnibus news media.<p>- Most traditional news media simply have too many employees.<p>- So called &quot;Quality Journalism&quot; isn&#x27;t going to save any newspapers.<p>- There are too many newspapers and too many other ways to hear about the actual event. The internet is one big news source.<p>- Making money on advertising require an amount of visitors that are simply not possible for most.<p>There is still room for news but it has to be either much smaller, focused and specialized or have to be one of a few multinational news-source providers that others can use.<p>The omnibus paper is dead.

I subscribe to the NY Times even though I am in Missouri. The actual weekend subscription with digital was cheaper than digital alone.<p>I&#x27;ve been a subscriber for over a year and enjoy the morning and evening wrap-ups delivered to my phone.<p>What I don&#x27;t enjoy are the constant, 3 a week, emails trying to get me to add something to the subscription. In fact, they change the offerings often enough I have trouble differentiating what they want me to buy. lol

I am appalled that the combination of Digital + Print costs as much or less than the digital subscription alone.<p>NYTimes, WSJ all seem to forget the basic principles of economics which dictate a certain amount of price elasticity is essential to bring in more customers. It seems almost punitive that digital customers pay at par with print customers when the incremental costs for the latter are relatively so minor.<p>If NYTimes is really serious about boosting it&#x27;s pure digital subscriptions, scaling back the height of the paywall is key - not to a trivial non-zero sum, but to an amount where the pure digital customer doesn&#x27;t feel ripped off.

I am surprised there is no mention of Blendle:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;27&#x2F;new-york-times-dutch-startup-newspaper-paywall_n_6053224.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;27&#x2F;new-york-times-dutc...</a>