Super Permanent Ink

Paying For The Times At SXSW

soupsoup:

David Carr at The New York Times

When I was in Austin, I would fall asleep each night to bad dreams, prompted by cable ranting that the world was melting down, principally in Japan. And each morning I would wake up to reporting that described in very careful detail what was actually known, not feared, about the nuclear crisis in Japan. Throughout the day, I checked my alerts to make sure the world was not ending imminently. Tellingly, I never picked up a copy of the paper, reading it on the new iPad where The Times is a living thing and the better for it.

People, real actual people, went and got that information, some of it at personal peril and certainly at gigantic institutional expense. So The Times is turning toward its customers to bear some of the cost. The Times is hardly alone: AFP, Reuters, Associated Press, Dow Jones, BBC and NPR are all part of a muscular journalistic ecosystem. But it seems an odd time to argue against a business initiative that aims at keeping boots on the ground during a time of global upheaval.

20 March 2011 ·