Goodbye, New York Times(再见，“纽约时报”) [O'Reilly Radar 中文站]

Jimmy Guterman 03.24.2008

I love The New York Times. I've read it almost every day of my life since I was in high school. For all its recent flaws – the weirdo profiles of the major presidential candidates are the most high-profile – it is still full of the most outstanding reporting. And, on the days that Gail Collins files, it offers up the most penetrating and entertaining opinion.

What's that? It's the last print copy of the Times I'll ever have delivered to my front door. Over the years, I've slowly weaned myself off subscriptions to physical newspapers, but it was hard to say no to the Times. The quality was high, the thump of the paper on the sidewalk was a pleasant sound to hear first thing in the morning, I liked the serendipity of walking through a print section, and I felt obligated to pay for the paper at a time when print subscribers were becoming an endangered species. But, after years of wavering, I'm done. The environmental argument alone should have been enough for me, but the simple fact is that I do more and more of my reading on a screen (the only holdouts: fiction and poetry). And plenty of that reading has been from the Times. What finally made me give in to the inevitable was realizing, one barely-dawn morning last week when I was reading the paper at our kitchen table, that I had already read much (most?) of it online. For all the pleasure of holding and print, the Times on paper is just too late. In 2008, today's paper is yesterday's news.

So now I'm a freeloader, although you could argue that my personal information, sent to the Times in return for a username and password, may have some value. I rarely, if ever, click on an ad on the Times's website. I would gladly pay for the pleasure and convenience of reading the paper online, just as I do for The Wall Street Journal, but I don't have that option. In this era of advertising-is-the-only-business-model, management at the Times Company has decided that I've decided that the value of what it sends to me is zero. I disagree – and I'm not going to pay a premium for the proprietary and little-used Times Reader to make my point.

I'll miss the paper on paper, and I bet I'll buy it when I'm on vacation, as a treat, an indulgence. But if even people like me – who adore The New York Times – can no longer justify a print subscription, how can its print version survive, except as a high-priced, scarce product for an increasingly elite audience?

我喜欢“纽约时报”。自从高中时代就每天必读。尽管最近有关于总统候选人的报道——那仍然是立场鲜明的，“纽约时报”仍然充满了最优秀的报道。在Gail Collins时代则是最敏锐和最富娱乐精神的报道。

那是什么？那是最后一份放到我门口的印刷版的“纽约时报”。这些年我逐渐减少了订阅印刷版报纸，但跟“纽约时报”说再见还是很难。质量很高，每天早晨掉在院子里啪的一声是我听到的第一声欣喜的声音。我喜欢走入这个印刷版报纸时那种探宝的心境，在这样一个订阅印刷版报纸的人越来越少的时代我仍然感到有必要为此付费。但是，经过几年的挣扎我还是放弃了。单单环境问题的原因就足以让我做这个决定，另一个促使我做此转变的简单原因是我现在越来越多地在屏幕上阅读（除了幻想小说和诗歌）。而且很多我阅读的内容都来自“纽约时报”。最终让我放弃印刷版的原因是：上周的一天几乎天快亮的时候我坐在厨房的桌子边看“纽约时报”，发现我已经在线读过上面很多（大部分）内容了。除了一书在手的乐趣之外这报上的内容都太迟了。2008年今天的报纸都是昨天的新闻。

所以我现在成了占便宜的人，可能你认为为了换得用户名和密码发过去的个人信息有些价值。我很少（也许曾经）点“纽约时报”网站上的广告。其实我非常愿意为在线阅读报纸的乐趣和便利付费，就像我阅读“华尔街日报”那样，但在“纽约时报”做不到这一点。在这样一个“广告是唯一商业模式”的时代“纽约时报”管理层却作了那样一件我认为毫无价值的事情。我不认同——也不会为之以及没用的Times Reader付费。

我会怀念印刷版的“纽约时报”，而且会在休假的时候继续买印刷版报纸，作为一种享受和放纵。但是如果连像我这样的人——喜爱“纽约时报”——都不能认可印刷版的报纸，它又怎么能存活下去？除非是一个定价高、精英受众不断增长的稀缺产品。