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| The New York Times |
To start, let me just give you a little background on what actually is going on. According to a March 20th New York Times article written by Jeremy W. Peters, starting March 28th, readers will have to pay for reading online content. The subscription plan includes $15/month for access to the web and a mobile phone app, $20/month for web access and an iPad app, or $35/month for an all access plan. Although the topic is highly controversial, and readers as well as journalists are not quite sure what to think, the New York Times took the leap anyway.
Because of this decision, other media outlets having been taking all kinds of approaches to reporting what exactly is going on.
Blogger Nick Baumann of Mother Jones blogged on April 1st about the new paywall. Baumann reported about New York Times stats expert Nate Silver, who put together a model to try to quantify what $15 would actually get you. Silver compared how much original content you would receive from the New York Times in comparison with the other leading media outlets, which Baumann commented, made the New York Times look pretty good.
Another article on April 1st by James Taranto of the Wall street Journal didn't quite report things that were quite as nice. He reported about Arianna Huffington, who made a little April fools fun with the paywall.
On March 29, Lance Ulanoff of PCMAG.com, described many of the positive and negative sides to the New York Times decision. Ulanoff also expressed that he saw changes like this coming for the media world, and that company's can't afford to just give away their best stuff.Arianna Huffington thinks she's funny. "Today . . . we introduce digital subscriptions for employees of The New York Times," boasts Puffington Host hostess Huffington in a Puffintgon Host post. It's April Fool's Day, of course, and Huffington is having some fun--or trying, anyway--at the expense of the Times and its porous paywall.
Arianna Huffington
For me, I agree with Ulanoff. We all knew a change like this was coming, we just didn't know when. The reactions people are having, I think are kind of funny. I believe those who love the New York Times will either pay to read it online or just find some way to get around the paywal and read it anyways, which is already a problem and can illustrated in the video below.
I think this blog post was very relevant to your topic of news and media coverage. This post was good in particular because it focused on media coverage of a news company. So as long as you stick to the topic of media coverage of events I think all your posts should be appropriate.
ReplyDeleteAs for the use of multimedia in your blog I have some thoughts on this blog and ideas for you later. The first thing I notice is the links, they stand out in a good way because they are orange. The second thing I noticed was the two pictures. It would be nice to put links under them as captions. Then viewers could not only click on them and go to that website but they would be cited properly. I wasn’t able to tell that that was Arianna Huffington right away. The video at the end fit with the text that you wrote throughout the blog.
Your post definitly has strong ties to your overall theme. It was interesting and filled with multimedia elements. Links to the sources you were citing, pictures (even one of someone who was quoted which was great, its good to put a face to a name), and even a video at the end. Just make sure to take a look over your post after you submit it, your video is covering the last couple words in your post. This happens to me all the time and is tricky to figure out how to place it so its not covering up words but not awkwardly an inch away from the rest of the text. Towards the end of you post you said that Lance Ulanoff listed some positive and negative effects of of the NYT paywall, maybe list some of these so your reader won't have to go search for them through hyperlinks.
ReplyDeleteSadie,
ReplyDeleteYour post was great in relevance to our class, as well as changes in the way online news can be accessed over the web.
I enjoyed how you elaborated on the topic of the New York Times that we discussed in class. As you may already know, Isaac stated in his most recent blog that some people found a way around the paywall for the NYT articles and are still accessing their news without paying.
Your use of multimedia I found substantial to say the least. You do a great job of citing the date and location of all your sources!