“Instead, if you go to various Time Magazine articles, it tells you that you should go buy the paper copy, or pay for the iPad version,” Masnick reports. “This isn’t quite a direct paywall, since there’s no way to directly pay online for the content. Instead, you first need to pay up for an iPad or take a trip to the store to get a paper copy of the magazine.”
MacDailyNews Take: Don’t kill more tress, go get yourself an iPad and be happy!
Masnick writes, “If I were running a Time competitor… say the massively struggling Newsweek, I would be all over the place telling people that my content is available online for all of you who don’t want to conform to Time’s view of how you have to read a general news magazine.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Too bad for Newsweak that they have even less credibility than a supermarket checkout rag.
First post?
I’m glad media is finally sticking up for itself. If it’s not careful and doesn’t start creating more paywalls it won’t exist!
It’s all bullshit. Time sucks now. They lost their pizzaz. News week sucks unbelievably bad now too. Too many opinion columns out there not enough reporting. Too many people choosing left or right no more down the middle here’s both sides inform yourself and make an informed decision.
Sounds like a flawed imitation of Murdoch’s online Wall Street Journal.
I’m with Lamos. If media doesn’t start charging, it won’t exist. Although I think Time is offbase on iPad pricing, hooray for it for starting to charge.
OK. So what is the story with the expectation that content producers (writers, visual artists, songwriters, etc) should create their “product” and then we get to STEAL it for FREE. That my friends is bovine manure. Since we should get product for free, I’m starting with a new BMW 750, not an issue of Time magazine…(ie:sounds kind of stupid, right?…). Frankly my only b–ch with Time is that I just cannot subscribe on my iPad, but have to buy each issue individually.
Many of the content creators just missed the shift of content delivery. Rather, they seemed to think that the internet was only useful as promotion. I was not with it at the time either, so it is tough to cast too heavy a stone… That said, rock on with the iPad and paid iPad versions of EVERYTHING. Killing trees is stupid currently. So, as a human, do you just want to be considered stupid or smart (like we are as a species…)?!
Newsweek, Time and many other trad magazines – clueless. I know it’s just a period of jockeying as the execs try to figure out what they’ve been missing, where they ‘fit’ in the New Age, and to find the sweet spot where they can make the most money, but in the meantime they lose creds and viewers and their base product sinks further downhill. Unless they start moving to an online model – for so many reasons – they’ll be lost in the muck.
MacDailyNews Take: Don’t kill more tress, go get yourself an iPad and be happy!
I’m pretty sure Time and other magazines are printed on paper and not hair. But I’ll double check…. I guess it could be hair.
“Credibility” is lacking with ALL mainstream (is that label even apply anymore – should be ‘leftstream’) media in my opinion.
Yeah, Time is within their rights to play this way, but they really need to firm up the iPad subscription and distribution process before suggesting people buy the digital version. First rule of marketing: don’t ask people to spend money on a product still in development. The only thing Time will achieve is massive resentment from an already apathetic circulation pool.
The only business model that is going to work longterm for almost all publishing endeavors is going to be some variation of a part free/ part pay model… but it won’t be a suck-you-in-with-an-excerpt-and-make-you-pay-for-the-rest-of-an-article model.
That’s just going to piss off most people.
They’re going to have to impress readers with dynamite stuff that’s free, so that readers will think the pay stuff is even more dynamite and be willing to pay for it.
And it had better be.
Unfortunately, considering the state of journalism these days, it’s a crap shoot how that will work out for general interest news publications like Time and Newsweek. They’d better get their acts together.
when my paper subscription runs out at year end, I will forget that there is such an anachronistic company…
By the time TIME realizes they would have been better off selling many millions of iPad magazines for $.99, no one will remember who they are… just an unused link in an aggregator app… too bad but they didn’t see the train coming even though it was flashing lights and blowing it’s horn.
SausalitoDog