New Yorkers stoop to low points for "The New York Times"

While University students get to enjoy the benefits of free copies of The New York Times every weekday, other New Yorkers are not so lucky.

A weekday subscription to The Times costs close to $500 and that still leaves readers without the Saturday or Sunday editions.

These readers have a few options: they can spend another $280 a year for delivery, spend $5 to buy a copy at a newsstand or read the paper online.

Rather than paying even more for subscriptions, many readers now choose to read articles on their, Web site Nytimes.com, for free.

Unfortunately, this option may not be available for much longer. Like many other local and national newspapers, The Times is facing budget problems and looking for new ways to increase revenue now that subscriptions are down.

The newspaper announced that beginning in 2011 they will no longer provide free, unlimited access to their Web site. Any readers with a current print subscription will also be given access to everything on the Web site, but those without a subscription must begin paying.

The proposed pay wall will charge people who view the Web site frequently a flat rate for unlimited access. In an article about the changes, The Times executives stated that casual readers will be unaffected. “They wanted to create a system that would have little effect on the millions of occasional visitors to the site, while trying to cash in on the loyalty of more devoted readers,” the article explains.

So far, they have not released details about how much content will be provided for free and at what point readers will need to begin paying to view articles.

Although The Times executives are hopeful that creating a pay wall on their Web site will increase revenue, other papers that have tried similar strategies are not getting the results they hoped for.

Newsday, a Long Island based paper, placed their Web site behind a pay wall last October. They decided to charge readers $5 a month for unlimited access to their Web site. Only 35 people have decided to pay for a subscription, which one writer for the paper summed up as “an abomination.”

After paying $4 million to redesign the Web site and launch the pay wall, the lack of subscriptions is a growing problem for Newsday.

Because of the decrease in web traffic, their ad revenue has also decreased. In order to recover costs, there is a proposed cut to writer salaries, which has left their newsroom in an uproar.

The Times hopes to avoid this by spending time researching the best way to implement their system. As The Times’ president Janet Robinson notes, “There’s no prize for getting it quick. There’s more of a prize for getting it right.”

Readers who are hoping to continue getting their news fix for free will still have another year before they need to find a way to avoid online and paper subscription fees.

In the meantime, some resourceful New Yorkers have already begun finding ways to get paper copies of the Sunday Times for free. Some avid readers are unwilling to spend $5 every Sunday, but would rather not read the news online, so they have started gathering neglected copies of the paper from doorsteps around the city.

Although these Sunday Times thieves know that what they are doing is illegal, they justify their habit by claiming that these papers would go unread otherwise.

Many of the papers are taken from out-of-towners’ stoops and would be wasted there if they were not liberated by avid readers. Even current Times reporters admit that they sometimes take the paper off an unsuspecting person’s stoop because they are not given free subscriptions.

One questions that arises in this situation, is how early is too early to steal a paper off someone’s front steps.

One Times reporter interviewed about the issue suggested that the paper thieves wait until Monday morning before attempting to liberate any papers so subscribers still have a chance to read their Sunday issue if they only went away for the weekend.

A different reporter is much bolder. Instead of waiting to the next day, this reporter thinks that anything after noon is fair game, “If you’re not up and out in the morning, I think you lose your right to it.

You snooze you lose.” This Times staffer does mention that it is equally as important to check if there are neighbors around or even more dangerous, security cameras no matter what time of the day the paper is being taken.

While many readers prefer the currently free content on the internet over paying the increasingly high cost of a paper subscription, other readers will result to ethically ambiguous means to attain a print edition of their favorite paper.

But regardless of the form, New Yorkers continue to turn to The Times for their news and the paper remains a New York institution.