New York Times Reader to Go Premium
In last week’s Haaretz interview with Arthur Sulzberger (in Davos), the New York Times Publisher reiterated that the New York Times Reader would not be a free service. That was hardly news, as the Times made clear from the start that it would not be free forever.
This morning, my Times Reader prompted me for a mandatory download of the latest version. In my experience, mandatory upgrades are rarely for the benefit of the user. I’m guessing that this latest upgrade includes the mechanism to support the paid model. I assume that it will continue to be free for print and Times Select subscribers, which makes sense. For while Sulzberger indicated the likelihood that the Times would stop printing newspapers in the not-to-distant future, they clearly do not intend to stop generating subscription revenue.
BTW – this release also had a few surprises. For starters, it overwrote all of the settings that I had previously put in (for example, time for the daily download of news). It also defaulted to automatically downloading future versions of the Times Reader. Considering that the technology behind the Times Reader is from Microsoft, I guess that shouldn’t come as a shock.
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