Thursday, November 13, 2014

What does my evening with Gay Talese and Sam Roberts have to do with The New Yorker's announcement of its new paywall system?

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While thinking about The New Yorker's announcement of its new online paywall system, I saw Gay Talese talk about the new 50th-anniversary edition of his chronicle of the building of the Verrazano Bridge in conversation with the NYT's Sam Roberts at the NY Transit Museum.

by Ken

Okay, the time has come. We knew it was going to happen. The (free) party is ending at newyorker.com, just like we knew it would when The New Yorker announced that for the summer its newly redesigned website was going to be thrown open to one and all. (See my July post "The New Yorker offers a big summer online bonus as it ramps up its Web operation -- and revamps access to it.") It was always with the clear understanding that this was a short-tem deal, a sort of time-out period in preparation for the introduction of some form of paid-access-to-content system. Now here we are, pressing on toward Thanksgiving, and it appears that that time has come.

We'll come back to that, after a brief digression prompted by my felt need to try yet again to make clear my somewhat murky position here. It's pretty much the same position I tried to make clear when the Times and the Washington Post erected their website paywalls. It sounds contradictory, my position, which is: (a) that I absolutely understand their need to try to extract some compensation for their online operations, and hope this leads them to some kind of going-forth-workable financial model for their enterprises, but (b) that I won't be personally paying. (For me personally, I should add, the case of The New Yorker is somewhat different, since as a subscriber I understand that I will continue to have full access to both the online content and the glorious archive.)

I suppose I like to imagine that this makes me a better person than the people who whine about the erection of those paywalls only because they feel entitled to continue having all that content free, since after all isn't content on the Internet supposed to be free? The answer, of course, is of course not. You really have to have been out in the sun too long to imagine that just 'cause we can poach stuff for free from the websites, that doesn't mean that the Times or the Post or The New Yorker can generate that content for free. They've had their age-old economic model blown out from under them, and unless they -- and all the other endangered print publications around the world -- can find another way of paying their way and maybe turning a bit of profit, there's a limit to how long they can go on publishing.

And this matters. Boy oh boy, does this matter.

My EVENING AT THE NY TRANSIT MUSEUM
WITH GAY TALESE AND SAM ROBERTS

I had a swell time this evening at the New York Transit Museum, where legendary jounralist-author Gay Talese was on hand to talk about the just-published 50th-anniversary edition, with a new 50-years-later afterword, of The Bridge, his 1964 book about the people involved -- from the people who built it to the people who had to coexist with it, or not -- meaning the thousands of people whose homes were wiped off the map with a casual wave of Robert Moses's neighborhood-eradicator wand.

It was a reminder that Gay's distiniguished literary career was grounded in his years as a general-assignment reporter for the New York Times. Asked by a NYT institution in his own right, longtime urban-affairs writer-editor Sam Roberts, how he became involved in the building of the bridge, he explained that it began with a simple one-shot assignment to cover a protest by Bay Ridge (Brooklyn) residents -- some steamed by the threat of transformation of their tightly knit enclave, others up in arms at the certain loss of their homes and everything they had built in their lives.

After that, Gay explained, he became fascinated by the opportunity to witness at first hand the building of a bridge, and not just any bridge, but what would be, at its completion, by a good bit the world's longest suspension bridge. He did continue to write about it for the paper, but he also spent much of his free time haunting the construction site, getting to know people connected in one way or another with the project. (Also on hand this evening was a youngish ironworker, Joe Spratt, the son and grandson of ironworkers, whose grandfather worked on the bridge and was featured in both the original book and the new afterward.)

Gay T: Another cousin-made suit?
At 82, Gay is still one terrific talker, and he spun a gorgeous web when Sam asked him what he wore when he interviewed all those ironworkers and other bridge workers, noting that Gay was famous for his sartorial flair. He was in fact wearing quite a lovely three-piece suit this evening, and he said that was pretty much his standard attire as a working journalist, for two reasons.

First, he noted, he is the son of a tailor, an Italian immigrant who had learned the craft of highest-quality hand tailoring from his family of tailors, and who passed on an attitude of respect for tailoring. The suit he was wearing this evening, he said, was 10 or 15 years ago by a cousin in, I think he said, Paris. (It seems there are family tailors not just in Italy and New York but in Paris and London. Gay therefore has something of a network of cousins.)

Second, just as he grew up learning to respect the tailoring profession, he has a deep respect for the profession of journalism. In a newsroom, he said, you're likely to find "fewer liars per square yard" than just about anywhere else on earth. And he has always felt an obligation to dress in a way that reflects his respect for the profession. And all evening he took pains to show his esteem for Sam Roberts, who has had a genuinely great career at the Times. When Sam asked how he thought the paper's Joe Berger's budding series on the in-the-works replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge, obviously inspired by Gay's Verrazano coverage, Gay first paid tribute to Joe Berger as an excellent reporter and looked forward to a fine series, but pointed out the crucial difference: The Verrazano is a work of art, which the new Tappan Zee, er, isn't likely to be.

It was all sweet, and charming, and moving. For all the flaws of the Times, it practices more journalism at a higher level than anybody else in the game. New-age frauds and phonies can babble all they like about the wonders of the online world, unless the Times can figure how to make it pay, we're not going to have it, and the babbling frauds and phonies haven't offered the tiniest whisper of a ghost of a possibility for how we would replace it. Vox? I don't think so.

Ditto the Post. Obviously this was on my mind when I wrote about the late Ben Bradlee, and wondered if he would have had any magic to do newspapering in an age so different from the one in which he built the Post into what he built it into backed by all the cash pumped in by his publisher. And The New Yorker? Okay, I had my problems during the Tina Brown era. But it seems to me quite well stabilized and comparably indispensable. And while I've learned to live with this strange feeling of not being anchored to a daily newspaper, I can't imagine doing without The New Yorker, or the New York Review of Books.

HERE, FINALLY, IS HOW THE NEW YORKER
PLANS TO MOVE INTO THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE


This letter appeared on newyorker.com Tuesday on the "News Desk" page:
November 11, 2014
TO OUR READERS
BY THE EDITORS

Remember summer, dear reader? Remember the balmy days of late July and a certain someone’s unfortunate cargo shorts and your own statement-making shades, the shattering sunlight and the trickle of Popsicle juice making its way down your wrist? Late July is also when we launched the redesigned newyorker.com and wrote our last letter to you, announcing that for the rest of the summer and into the fall we would unlock everything we published—everything in the weekly magazine and the fifteen-some pieces that appear exclusively online every day—so that everyone, including non-subscribers, could get a full sense of The New Yorker. (Subscribers, of course, have always had carte blanche.)

An extended free-for-all is what it was, and dozens of Web sites went on a curatorial link-bait binge, assembling top-ten (and top-fourteen and top-eight) lists of New Yorker reported pieces, humor pieces, short stories, essays, and cartoons.

Naturally, we were hoping that the exhibitionism of July-till-now would be an enticement. We said then that we would soon come to a “second phase,” and here it is: as of now, we are beginning an easy-to-use metered paywall. You probably know how this works; the New York Times has a metered paywall, and so do many other publications. The idea is to deliver The New Yorker to you seamlessly on every platform and for us to charge a fair price. (And it really is fair. One week’s access to The New Yorker costs a subscriber less than a good cup of coffee.)

The truth is that, ever since The New Yorker went online, we’ve always had a paywall. (Remember those bewildering little blue locks?) Now all pieces—Web and print—will live in front of it, and you can start wherever you wish. If you already subscribe, all you have to do is sign in and it’s clear sailing. If you don’t, you get to read six stories each calendar month, whether from the current issue, from an issue published five years ago, or from a blog updated ten minutes ago. If you want to make the “wall” go away and read a seventh, you’ll have to subscribe. . . .
From my experience yesterday and today, newyorker.com seems in a state of confusion. I've actually been able to access things I wanted. What I haven't been able to do is get anything to happen with either the "Sign in" or the "Link your subscription" supposed-links. (It's still not clear to me whether my old user name and password are still good, or I have to re-link to my subscription.) But I imagine this will all get worked out. These things usually do.

What won't get worked out so easily is the feelings of people who click onto a link to, say, the latest "Borowitz Report," only to find that Andy has been sequestered behind the new paywall.
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1 Comments:

At 10:58 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

What information "news" provides is increasingly intended to be delivered only to those who pay for it. The rest of us will be expected to do without.

 

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