Journal Journal: The Economic Blunder of the NY Times Management, et al.
In general, information's value is temporal - you need it at the right place, at the right time. This is fundamental idea of corporate Knowledge Management projects. Information arriving before the right time isn't recognizable as useful - the context for judging value doesn't exist yet (9-11-2001 and 12-7-41 are classic examples that beg forbearance and forgiveness at a certain level). Information arriving after the right time is already available from many other sources - everybody already knows the same thing so you have no competitive advantage. Information value then reaches a long-term near-but-non-zero "archival" value asymptote. The value follows a curve something like a Poisson distribution over time. Information arrives in our perception and is either recognized for having its utility or not.
The strength of the Internet as an information-economic medium is that though most of the information as individual iota are on average worthless - most published information is in the tail of the value curve. Due to sheer volume and automation (world-wide networking, search engines, general purpose browsers, etc.), a collection or aggregate of such iota, can be of high particular value to any one person's individual needs. In short, the information rendezvous cost is extremely low.
The key is: no or little top-down design is required, thus creation of value is emergent and unplannable. Users are able to forgo the cost of "central planning" and "ten-year plans" for information "preparation".
As argued in the article, the NYT has gotten their pricing all wrong and the information market, aka Internet users, have voted with their clicks. Search engine ranking are based on the actions of those users, so basically the NYT's search engine rankings undesireable low which recursively makes users use them less, etc.. Short of buying a higher ranking there's not much they can do - it's their own fault.
From the article, it seems that the only reason they maintain their current restrictions is their Lexis-Nexis cash-cow contract ($20M-$30M per year). This basically distorts management's view of the underlying market value signals. They may well have deluded themselves into believing their pricing model can be set arbitrarily because of this. Based on the bottom line, perhaps they've made the right decision. It's probably the worst possible long-term choice though.
A media company's value is directly linked to the value of the information they relay. Thus they can "fall off" the peak of the information value curve. You can routinely see this with other print media today. My own personal "favorite" for this is the SF Chronicle which can't seem to help being "late and out-of-date" before it leaves thre presses.
Hey, not even media companies care about their long-term survival anymore - it's only next quarter that matter, right.
