MEMO
to the New York Times

First, permit me to say that your prices are too way too high.

How could the political Right possibly call you a liberal mouthpiece if you’re not even targeting customers outside the 1%. Who among the 99% has $200 or more per year to spend to receive news they can get for free on the web? I know I do not.

Call me communist if you like. I’m not, but you can call me that if it somehow soothes you. I’d be willing to pay a reasonable amount to have access to the Times. But $195 a year for your cheapest digital plan? That is, if I only want it on one of my digital devices? And $455 if I want it on “both” of my devices? Seriously? When your incremental cost of having me as a customer is nearly zero? I know you’re used to charging a lot for the paper edition if I live far away, but that was because everyone knew there was a lot of physical paper that had to be printed, shipped, and carried to my door. You have none of those costs any more. You take my money and tolerate a trivial amount of bandwidth to get me my data. We all live right next door to you now, and we aren’t expecting paper, so we want a rational price. I don’t think that’s asking too much.

If you’re wondering why you’re not getting more people subscribing, your pricing is surely why. It’s a travesty.

Annoyed with all that, we even explored your “Shared All Digital Access” plan to see if somehow a family plan would bring the price within reason. It doesn’t. It can be claimed a slight improvement over not having such an option, but I am profoundly disappointed in you for not solving the problem of “whole family” subscriptions at a rational cost. What you lose in individual sales over what you wish you’d get, you’d make back up in volume, I think.

Moreover, it seems clear to me you’ve tried to dodge criticism of this plan as a “family” plan by calling it a “shared” plan, but we the public, especially those with an interest in your publication, are not fooled. This is plainly a family plan—just not one properly set up for families. I realize you need money, but gouging the 1% is not the way to do it. Find a way to appeal to the 99% and you’ll do fine.

Yet you run television advertisements that boldly assert that the new digital subscriptions offer ‘all the value’ that print subscriptions had. They don’t. Shame on you for trying to claim premature victory without confronting this really major problem.

One very important bit of value in the paper edition of the New York Times is that you can leave it laying around the house and it will be readable by other household members who are almost certainly not subscribers. This includes anyone from the very young to those in college. Asking us to tell our kids they must log into mommy or daddy’s account is not an acceptable thing. Nor is asking us to fork over hundreds more per year just to have one child get their own proper subscription. There is nothing even remotely family friendly about this option.

The paper edition may be of value to some of our parents as well, who may have moved back in with their grown children to save money. Shared expenses for food, heat, telephone, and newspaper are examples of useful consolidations. Digital subscriptions offer you the opportunity to make that expense consolidation harder, but is that really your goal—to break even on the backs of poor senior citizens?

For years the print version was available in machines where you dropped your quarter or 50¢ or $1 or whatever the price was into a physical box and then opened the box to reveal he entire stack of newpapers. People could have taken all of them. But the stark reality of this situation was a moment of important life learning for many of us. It was a chance for parents to explain that if people just take all of them, the nice newspaper people won’t stay in business. This is where many of us came to grips with the fact that trust makes the world go around. If a few people cheated, we learned to think poorly of them, and the New York Times was still none the worse for it. Because most people learned honor.

Speaking of our societally shared values, it can’t have escaped your notice that our society is bifurcating into “haves” and “have nots,” between the 1% and the 99%. The antidote to this is knowledge, and our best hope is a community of the well-educated. The richest among us will have money to buy subscriptions for their budding heirs. Please don’t lock out the kids of our poorer citizens, as this is likely to contribute to the ever-widening chasm between the two groups. Invest in a healthy crop of new readers tomorrow by making it easy for them to become literate today.

Assuming you priced all the plans a bit lower, perhaps a family plan should still cost just a little more than a two-person plan. I don’t know, but I tend to think not. It definitely shouldn’t cost 50% more, or worse. I’ll bet the extra revenue you’d make by just offering a fair and accessible plan would broaden your base and increase your revenue enough to more than compensate for any abuse.

As to how many children should be covered—why not just ask the people as they’re signing up how many they have? I don’t think the typical case of someone trying to defraud you will be people walking up with their checkbooks open and trying to pay you while trying to cheat you all at the same time. There are easier and cheaper ways to get pirated content. Don’t overthink this. I claim you stand to lose more than you stand to gain.

I wouldn’t even object if you offered the dependent accounts in slightly restricted form, perhaps as read-only accounts without the right to post personal opinions—or perhaps allowing them to post but only if one of the parents reviews and approves it. That might be attractive for other reasons of privacy and safety anyway. Social media with “training wheels.”

I really want to support the Times, but I want fair value for a subscription and, your claims in your ads notwithstanding, you’re not yet doing that. So We’re not subscribing now. None of us. It’s all just too much. I was willing to pay something in support of your organization, but you’ve been unreasonable. What I’ll do instead is give to your competition, organizations that will be grateful to know I cared to support them at any level.

So while you’re tallying up the imaginary dollars you might lose due to abuse, and while you’re wondering what more content you have to add to get subscribers, consider this: You’re just priced badly. If you did it right, you’d have lots more subscribers and the price you needed to charge per subscription wouldn’t have to be as high. But it starts with you, not with me. A reduced-price trial subscription to a way-too-high regular rate is not fooling me and I suspect is not fooling anyone.

Treat your readers with the respect they are due, as has been your long tradition, and it may bring in new readers that you aren’t getting now—people you’ll want and need later. Plus it will allow you to hold your head high.

If you can’t do that, then my fallback suggestion is to hiring more ultra-right-wing “journalists” because your only market will be the super-wealthy. Maybe Colbert Platinum can give you some ideas. Good luck with that.

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