Salvation (for Newspapers) Is at Hand - NYTimes Paywall
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
This makes me want to pat the NYT on the head and tell them how adorable they are.
The fact that they're 1+ years away from implementing this may indicate that they have some knowledge about how technologically stupid this idea is, but are hoping that investors don't figure that out.
PS: The problem with the newspaper model is it provides so little value. In the old days they survived on advertizing but there are far more locations for advertizing now, so the pay is far lower. Take the Haiti incident, there was a 7.0 earthquake which killed or injured a lot of people and destroyed most of their infrastructure. All the important information in an SMS post and everything after that point is just entertainment.
I block gifs and Flash. It is moronic to have text on screen and then have something that is moving in the corner of your eye. You simply can't read it (and if you can, it is not enjoyable).
Disingenuous much?
Think about it, you have successful sites run with minimal overhead, such as 3-5 writers and 1 marketing/business/admin guy to handle the stuff the writers don't know how to do. Compare that to what NYT does.
You can't compare the New York Times to a website run by a couple of people. Most small news sites get their content from other small news sites or from larger organizations that do a lot of the actual reporting (like the New York Times).