[Upd-discuss] Wired on BBC Creative Archive

[Andy Oram]

By the way, I was just talking to a publisher about the New York Times
web site and heard some interesting statistics.

I was complaining to him that the Times decided to charge money for
accessing old articles. (Of course, free access is supposedly available
only to people in the U.S. in the first place.) I pointed out that the
NYT is a historical resource and an important reference point for
serious authors; now we can't link to it. (This doesn't mean I think the
NYT is objective or complete.)

My colleague said they get only a few hundred thousand dollars a year
from subscribers who access their content. But because the archives are
hidden, they earn over six million dollars a year selling it to such
services as Lexis.

It's good money, but I also think the policy reflects fear over what's
happening to the newspaper industry (and not just because people use the
Internet). In book publishing myself, I appreciate such fears, but I'm
trying to deal with it in a progressive manner.
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Oram  O'Reilly Media                     email: andyo@oreilly.com
Editor     90 Sherman Street                       voice: 617-499-7479
           Cambridge, MA 02140-3233                  fax: 617-661-1116
           USA                         http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/
Stories at Web site:
The Bug in the Seven Modules     Code the Obscure     The Disconnected
----------------------------------------------------------------------