The news is more than ten days old by now: TimesSelect Surpasses 270,000 Subscribers in Less Than Two Months is the November 9 press release. Various people have parsed this release for meaning, direction, and the future of all information. Personally, I find it most telling that TimesSelect is such a non-entity in my daily news consumption.
Beyond my review of the introductory experience, I haven’t come across a single article behind the pay wall. No one has forwarded an email, no one has blogged an article, and my few articles a week from the Technology feed never led me any farther.
Coincidentally, my News Tracker subscription ended on November 12, three days after the release.
Dear News Tracker Subscriber,
You are receiving this e-mail because our records indicate your
News Tracker subscription has ended.
News Tracker is now a part of TimesSelect, a new premium service on NYTimes.com.
If you subscribe to TimesSelect you will maintain all of your News Tracker
preferences in addition to getting exclusive online access to the Times’s Op-ed
and select News Columnists and extensive access to The Archive.
(snip)
If you wish to subscribe to TimesSelect, and keep your News Tracker
preferences and alerts, please purchase or sign up for TimesSelect.
(snip)
If you do not wish to continue your News Tracker subscription, no action is necessary,
as your subscription has ended.
I’m pleased that NYT did not roll over my subscription in an opt-opt manner. That decision gives the customer some credit for intent, and boosts my confidence in the numbers cited. I appreciate politeness.
I do know of at least one print subscriber who has struggled — and given up — on enabling his free TimesSelect subscription, so the “convert from print” numbers can only go up. But it’s telling that the need for the information has not lifted my colleague’s efforts enough to go beyond the frustration of the process. If he were not reading the print edition, would he miss what’s available via TimesSelect?
That’s the question that NYT needs to find the right answer to over the next decade or so. I think they have at least that long to make this transition, but maybe people and events will move faster than I imagine.