What Does the NYT Intention Mean?

The future of electronic publishing is at stake here. Before the Internet, no content creator really thought much about what is the worth of the Intellectual Property of the company. It was safe. You either buy my paper, or wait until somebody else leaves it in the coffee house, or go to the library. In any case somebody had to buy the paper edition.

My friend Aurelio Fernández Fuentes in Puebla, Mexico; accepted my offer to host his paper in our server at the Univeristy of Puebla in the middle nineties. He asked me: How will I make money? and I answered: That is your problem, all I want to do is to put it online for free.

It seems that the time has come to answer the question.

Many newspaper companies have been clobbered. They are no more. The big papers consolidated the market. But now they want to charge.

I expected these huge companies eventually to collect their take, once they pushed everybody out of business.

OK, here we are, now what?

This is going to happen until 2011, but the NYT hunchos are already getting ready for it. I wonder if 2012 is an issue here? Just kidding. I'm not expecting a PREDICTED global collapse. I am afraid of an spontaneous(?) one. There are many distress signals. After the Haitian apocalypse, and the little tremor here in Chilpancingo, a few minutes ago. I am not that relaxed. I don't like these rumblings. What am I supposed to do? though, stop living? No way. I just hope I do not go through a situation like in Haiti.

Massachusetts went Republican, at least in the Senate race. If it means, something, it is that greed may be returning. Probably I am reading too much into that close loss.

I just went to Warrenville, IL. I was pleasently surprised; my fellow Americans seemed to be on top of things, at least compared to my Mexican buddies, my compadres.

Yes, the NYT will charge me if I want to keep reading the paper. Nevertheless the world seems different, it is not possible to go back to the past. Now we have iTunes, and more $.99 songs sold than McDonald hamburgers. Electronic commerce is here to stay. More IT jobs, and new companies. This is actually what I want to think about; but that is for the next post.