Learning to Live Without

In life we often have to learn to live without something. I learned to live without apples when I discovered I was allergic to them. I learned to live without a sister because I was the only girl born to my parents.

I have learned to live without paying for news. This is similar to learning to live without a sister, because I never had to "give up" my news, rather I never knew what it was like to pay for it.

Many kids do not grow up reading newspapers, and I was one of them. In high school I started to read our local town newspaper, The Daily Local, but only to see if my name made it into articles after each and every one of my high school swim meets. Having an email address and instant messenger account since elementary school, I was accustomed to living half of my life online. Checking "The Daily Local" was simply an early morning ego boost, and took about 2 minutes of my time.

So when I became a grown up, and joined the real world ready to start every morning with the news, naturally I went to the internet. Being a New Yorker, it made sense to read the NY Times, however I discovered that due to a paywall  it cost money to access every article on the site. I could barely afford my rent in Manhattan, so I had to find a better way to consume the news.

There was: free sources such Foxnews.com, CNN.com and Business Insider along with Facebook and Twitter where my friends posted news and updates from around the world keeping me in the loop.

Ha! Why should I pay for the NY Times? Some of the news apps on my iPhone alert me to breaking news for free! How's that for staying up to date?

After reading about the NY Times paywall, I decided to catch up on NY Times Modern Love articles, as I have done sporadically over the past 6 years. However, I was greeted with this message, alerting me I apparently already caught up on some of the love stories recently:

Luckily it is almost the end of June, which means that I could read a few more articles, and now wait only a week until July to read the rest. 

Had it not been the end of June, I may have clicked and paid to view the articles, as it is not an overly pricey subscription (although I would be paying the student discounted price!)

The NY Times paywall structure of allowing users to view some content and then requiring them to pay for the rest seems to be one of the better thought out strategies. NYT still can get advertiser revenue, the fee is fairly priced, and the stories/content are reliable enough that readers feel they are receiving a good bang for their buck.

But what about me? What about the user who grew up not reading the newspaper and learned to keep up to date with current events through various internet sources? The user who never received news from the nytimes.com, but from news sites that allow access to all content because they have broadcast backing them, or tons of paid ads. The user who has friends that pay NY Times subscriptions and write paragraphs about their thoughts of the situations on their Facebook pages? How will the NY Times get me to pay?

I don't think the biggest problem facing the NY Times is getting people to pay to access the content online. I think their biggest problem is an up and coming generation that doesn't understand the need to pay for news and has grown up learning to live without.

For readers like my parents, the NYT goal is to convert them from print to digital, which they will pay for instead of paying for print. For me, it's not about finding a way to make me pay, it's about finding a way to convince me to do something I've never needed to do before and do not understand. Good luck.

P.S. Breaking sports news update for all my Boston and Los Angeles friends (thanks to a Facebook friend I have not seen or spoken to in 11+ years):