Comparing costs of WestlawNext and Westlaw Classic

Wow! Emily Marcum, at Lightfoot, Franklin, White, LLC in Birmingham, Alabama, has just published a really interesting and useful paper. I am sorry that it must be paid for, since it's behind a paywall at Taylor and Francis. It costs $37 to buy the article.  However, it's a great piece of research.   Good for you, Emily!   She compares the cost to the client of research on both platforms. Here is the abstract which appears for free at the site, and summarizes both her methods and her conclusions:

The cost to the client of Westlaw versus WestlawNext was assessed using two research methodologies. One methodology reflected realworld questions over time across categories. The other methodology had artificially generated questions broken down by category and evenly numbered across platforms. In both experiments, WestlawNext cost the client roughly double the cost of Westlaw Classic. Simplified pricing plans were cheaper for primary law and expert materials but were more expensive for other categories.

Thank you, Emily for doing the work to test out the costs.  I am sure West folks will have comments, and perhaps other folks might have other comments as well. But it is research like this, which is useful to librarians in the field and tests based on real-world research scenarios that I am so glad to see.

The Times Paywall Finally Goes Up

The New York Times announced today that its new paywall has gone up for readers in Canada, and that the paywall for the United States and the rest of the world will go up on March 28. According to the email I got, the rollout in Canada will allow the company "to fine-tune the customer experience before [the] global launch." Does this mean that if our experience is bad, we can blame Canada?

Readers will be able to view twenty articles per month, and after that level is reached, will not be able to view anything more unless they are digital subscribers. I was happy to see that "Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit." That seems like a reasonable approach to me, and one that should help to keep Times stories in wide circulation. Here's New York magazine's take on the paywall. The Times is gambling that regular visitors to the website will be willing to pay to access it. The question really boils down to whether the Times and other newspapers can "reverse 15 years of consumer behavior and build a business around online subscriptions?" It's safe to say that newspapers, both in the United States and around the world, will be watching.

Update on Murdoch's Pay Wall

The Times of London went behind a paywall on June 15. In addition, the owner of The Times, Rupert Murdoch, blocked search engines from including Times stories in their search results. The authors must love this! This was covered at the Law Librarian Blog by Mark Giangrande, who also reported on the "steep decline in online viewers" since the changeover to the paywall. One source reports a decline of 65% in online readers, while another reports 90%--both large numbers, to be sure, and large enough that no one could claim that the paywall has been a success so far.

An interesting twist on The Times's paywall experiment is provided by Michael Wolff at Newser. Wolff declares that

Will [Murdoch's] paywall work is the biggest story in the media business, and it would be quite a journalistic coup to document the progress, or lack thereof, that's being made in trying to convince a skeptical world to shell out 2 pounds ($3) a week for what's heretofore been free.

He is not reporting on himself because even less than most news outlets, Murdoch outlets have no objective sense when it comes to their own interests ... or willingness to ask questions which the boss might find uncomfortable, or penchant for anything but the party line. The news from News Corp. is always snarlingly good--even when it is very bad.

My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself--who have free access to the site--are not going beyond the registration page. It's an empty world.

Why would writers want to write for The Times if their work is not going to be read? Some might feel that Murdoch is the "last best hope for getting us paid for our labors" but writers want to be read; as Wolff points out, readers are the "real currency" of writers. Will the paper become irrelevant in a world of free news? The Wall Street Journal is behind a partial paywall and seems to be profitable, but the Journal occupies a very special niche with few real competitors. Can The Times make that claim? What implications does Murdoch's experiment with The Times have for The New York Times, which plans to erect its paywall in 2011? Murdoch's goal seems to be to protect the market for the print newspaper, but hasn't that train already left the station?

Thirty-five Subscribers

We have blogged recently about the decision by The New York Times and other newspapers to put their content behind pay walls. The justification for this move is to generate revenue that will pay for high-quality news operations; the newspaper management states that they cannot afford to give away their content. They might want to take a look at Newsday, the Long Island daily that put its website behind a pay wall in late October. The New York Observer ran a trenchant article about the website today. "So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?" The answer is thirty-five, which represents gross revenues of about $9,000. As web traffic declines, it is likely that advertisers will flee and take their business elsewhere. One of the reasons people might not want to pay to read Newsday online is that the paper is not what it used to be. It once was a respected publication, but now it has no national correspondents or foreign bureaus. Would higher-quality content lead to more subscribers? All eyes will be on the Times when its pay wall goes live next year.

The Times to Erect a Pay Wall

In 2007, The New York Times dropped a pay wall after failing to realize expected revenues. Many online readers breathed a sigh of relief, and continued to enjoy the free online content. Now, however, The Times is planning to "announce the introduction of a so-called 'pay wall' before the much-rumoured launch of Apple's new tablet computer, which is thought to be specially designed for easy newspaper reading, on January 27." This report comes from an article in the Telegraph, a British newspaper. The Telegraph reports that Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the Times Company chairman, favors "a metered use policy similar to The Financial Times, which allows readers to access some articles for free before they are forced to subscribe." The Financial Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, as is The Wall Street Journal, which also charges for content. In fact, News Corporation is planning to "introduce charging for all the company's newspaper websites, including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and News of the World. My colleague Vicky Gannon, who sent me the link to the Telegraph article, says it's one thing to charge for The Times, but quite another to charge for The Sun and News of the World, which do not exactly qualify as high-quality content. It looks as if paid access to online newspapers is the wave of the future, and in fact newspapers have to make money from their content if they are survive. Advertising revenues are not enough to sustain a major news-gathering operation. "More than 1,200 news organisations worldwide have signed up with Journalism Online, a new media payment firm whose clients are expected to start rolling out fees soon." It's hard to imagine that most people are going to pay for subscriptions to more than one or two newspapers, making it inevitable that some newspapers will simply not be competitive in the online environment.