ChasNote

Three months after the Dolan family (owners of Cablevision) bought Newsday for $650 million and put the website behind a paid subscription wall, only 35 people have coughed up the $5 per week fee.

Subscribers to the print edition and to Cablevision’s Optimim Cable package can read the site for free, which, as one Newsday reporter put it (via The NY Observer), makes Newsday.com “the freebie newsletter that comes with your HBO.”

Two observations:

One: While it might suggest that publishers can slow the abandonment rate among print subscribers by giving those subscribers more value for the buck (generally a good business practice!), it’s another data point in the argument that paid online news models (NYT, for example) will struggle.

Two: The above model is broken. If news audiences are migrating to digital formats, publishers that — come on, let’s be honest — erect a pay wall around the digital product as a ploy to save print (or cable) subscribers are eating their own children. It’s a tactic to buy more time to figure out digital. But while traditional print publishers are “buying more time,” their competitors (especially the native digital publishers) will win the game. In other words, buying time before you have to deal with your digital strategy is the opposite of what publishers should be doing.

New York Times deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman tells The Observer: “nothing about the Web has changed the front page of the paper in any fundamental way.”

Odd, isn’t it? I agree with The Business Insider: “Web editors simply must pay attention to readers’ clicks for two obvious reasons. It’s the main way readers can show what kinds of stories they care about.”

Meanwhile, what’s this NYTimes prototype?

The Incredible Hulk movie download That’s the question James Poniewozik asks at Time’s Tuned In blog.

“The questions are, simply: what/who will pay, will it work, and what will it pay for? ….Beyond that, the shoulds are just a philosophical exercise. New systems for funding the time to do journalism are not going to appear just because you, I or Bill Keller thinks they should. Few people will pay for news because they should. And news media are not going to find a way to bring you content for free just because they should.”

I say the NY Times will fail with a for-pay service unless it does two things. One, treat the for-pay service as an application, not a content offering. Two, make the for-pay service available on a commerce platform we’re all already using, namely iTunes or Amazon.

Too many newspaper publishers are stuck viewing the world from a “content is my value” orientation. This confuses them into thinking anyone has ever paid for his or her newspaper subscription because the writing is so darn good that riots in Iran covered by any other author just wouldn’t convey the news. Oh please. I get it that investigative reporting — the hard work of tracking down the facts and verifying them on certain stories — isn’t free, but the major newspapers don’t have a monopoly on reporting either, and most of the news we read everyday doesn’t require Bob Woodward to find another Deep Throat.

An “app” orientation assumes that what we readers are paying for (since the dawn of newspapers) is service. Two services, mostly. One, getting the news to our doorstep or a newsstand conveniently located on our walk to the train station. ISPs and web browsers on our cellphones have solved the news-delivery problem; we’re not likely to pay a publisher for home delivery again. Two, culling Entropy movie

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the over-abundant supply of current events down to the handful of news items I need to be aware of — those five stories each day elected by the NYT editors to make the front page. We pay for the filtering, not the quality, of the content.

I’m sure there are other valuable news services beyond those two. My point is that we are all more likely to hand over money for a “service” than for a bag of content. The news organizations that lean into services will win the day.

The Daily Show asks the Times’ managing editor to show him, in today’s paper, “one story that happened today.”

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My colleague Ivan Kanevski sent me this screenshot from the New York Times’s homepage from earlier today, 10:40pm Eastern Time. The photo accompanying the article, As Storefronts Become Vacant, Ads Arrive Lie with Me trailer

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, shows one such storefront plastered with Intel posters. It turns out, Intel is also running ads today in every available ad zone on the NYT’s homepage. Ooh, that’s awkward.

I just visited the NYT’s homepage (now 11:11pm Eastern Time) and the editors have changed the photo to a vacant storefront postered with Nestea ads instead. Phew! That’s better.

(Intel is still mentioned in the body of the article: “Ads for Intel that went up on Monday capitalized on the bankruptcies of stores like the Disney Store, Domain Home and Comp-USA, filling their former shops with digital billboards.”)

From Marketwatch

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:

“Speaking to analysts during a conference call, Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations, said it was more difficult for NYTimes.com to command premium ad rates for display ads during the quarter. As a result, the site will be increasingly designed for cost-per-click ads during 2009, Nisenholtz said.”

The NY Times moving into CPC? Doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. NY Times has a quality-content formula and deep experience in selling premium display advertising to major brands; that’s a segment of the media and marketing sector in which it could and should be a leader. The direct response CPC business requires a different set of muscles (and technologies) that I don’t think NY Times has.

When you’re losing in game you ought to win, I’m not sure the best move is to take up a new sport that’s heavily dominated by Google.

(Disclosure: The NY Times is an investor in Federated Media.)

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UPDATE 1/29/09: Clarification from PaidContent

, it’s About.com rather than NYT proper that is moving toward CPC:

“Martin Nisenholtz, NYTCo’s SVP for digital operations, said that with display looking particularly weak at About.com, the company would begin a site redesign that’s intended to reduce its exposure to display. Instead, cost-per-click is a growing category for About, and the redesign would try to exploit that more.”

Last summer Chevy and the NY Times launched a sponsored section that re-purposed editorial content on green fuel technologies and Chevy coverage at http://chevy.nytimes.com The Boondock Saints film . I loved the idea, of course, and even went so far as to suggest that the NY Times borrowed the idea from FM, since we launched something quite similar with Chevy a month or two earlier, called Best of the Green Web.

As I reviewed audience data for Best of the Green Web earlier this week — monthly pageviews in the 6 figures; nearly 2000 subscribers have taken the RSS feed; 15% of the site’s traffic comes by way of natural search; a Dynamic Logic study shows that purchase intent increased significantly for visitors to the site — I decided to check in on Chevy’s sister project with the NY Times. Here’s what I found:

I searched NYT for “Chevy” just to see if the project had moved to a new URL, but I couldn’t find any trace. This is a mistake on two levels.

One, when you publish good content, even as a marketer that’s licensing content originally created by someone else, your readers share the content with their friends by linking back to it. Now those readers are transformed from evangelists (of your content, if not necessarily your brand or products) to grumpy bloggers who have to clean up broken links on their sites.

Two, you admit to readers that, No, this site wasn’t really valuable content that needed to be published or (in this case) assembled from other sources into its own stand-alone mini publication at the NY Times domain. It was just a marketing gimmick. Imagine how you’d feel if you were one of the suckers — you subscribed to the RSS feed, you shared it with friends on your blog or Facebook profile, maybe you even referred to it as editorial content from the New York Times (since, after all, it was) — only to be told, after the ad campaign ended, that you were wrong for thinking you were a part of a 3-way conversation among the Times, Chevy and your fellow environmentally-conscious Chevy fans. You merely tripped into an ad campaign.

The New York Times has launched a sponsored content section in partnership with Chevy that brings together editorial stories from the Times archive featuring GM, Chevy, fuel cell and hybrid vehicles.

I love it. How could I not? It’s a full sibling of The Best of the Green Web site FM launched in partnership with Chevy back in May. I may love it even more, since it’s validation from the Gray Lady that conversational marketing — if done transparently and authentically — can coexist comfortably with the most respected ethics in journalism.

(Disclosure: The Gray Lady is an investor in FM.)